How much of what we do as adults is the result of how we were raised?
I pondered that question as I worked in the yard recently.
As many of you know from my previous musings, my maternal grandmother and my mother were the two most responsible for making me a lover of digging in the dirt to have flowers.
A portion of the property at my house—heck, most of the property at my house—is underutilized, covered with vines, weeds, ivy; the kind of stuff that collects when no one sees the need to landscape with a purpose.
The driveway splits the lower, street-front part of the postage-stamp-sized urban lot, with the house sitting right in the middle.
I’ve owned the house for less than a year, so this is our first spring.
Everything on the opposite side of the driveway had been allowed to run, as we say, covered with periwinkle ivy, which I guess has its admirants though for me it is just a step below English ivy for its ability to take over and drown a landscape.
Sprinkle in some thumb-sized honeysuckle vines wrapping the bushes and rhododendron, add a heavy concentration of wildflowers: trillium, Solomon’s seal, wild columbine, ferns, jack in the pulpit, and an old-fashioned snowball bush and you have an idea of that sliver of land that could be the dominant visual landscape of that portion of my yard. If but for the periwinkle and honeysuckle.
The land is a narrow strip running up a slope, and could be a dramatic visual if I could just get it back to a stable and managed state.
So that’s what I have been doing, an hour at a time, usually the final hour of the day as the sun creeps towards Balsam Ridge to the west.
Interestingly, a scientific paper published in Preventive Medicine Reports has noted that gardening is arguably one of the most common ways of interacting with nature, and suggests that there are a wide range of health outcomes attributed to gardening. According to the study, there is increasing evidence that “gardening provides substantial human health benefits.”
Now, neither mom nor Nana could have cited scientific arguments for the idea that putting your hands in dirt to grow flowers or vegetables is good for you. But they knew it, nonetheless, and that—along with the idea that beautiful flowers add to one’s life enjoyment—is probably one of the reasons they dragged—or ordered—me out in the yard to dig or transplant or rake or mow or any of the many chores involved with maintaining an organized yard.
I know people who have beautiful yards; they go regularly to the gym while relying on landscaping services for seasonal yard additions or cleaning. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they are paying a gym for results they could probably see up close and personal if they did the weed pulling and hauled the mulch bags and new plants.
I am not saying everyone must mow their own grass. Heck, I would have lost a lot of money as a kid if everyone I mowed for had told me they needed to do it themselves and had no need to pay me.
However, my adult love of weeding and planting flowers goes way beyond the idea that it engenders “substantial human health benefits.”
That’s important, even more so as I get older and work to lower my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol level.
I love that gardening helps all of that for me, but I do it because it is a deep part of my being, planted there to grow and thrive by Nana and my mother.
I can think of few better gifts, from one generation to another, and it is one reason I am trying to introduce a love of plants and flowers in my granddaughter, who will be three in July. She and I planted some pansies last autumn at the end of my driveway, and recently I mailed her photos of those flowers, our two dogs—she calls them the doggos—and a seed packet she can get her parents to help her plant in their yard.
“The flowers that grow from these seeds are called marigolds, and we like how pretty they look when they are grown. If you plant them soon you will probably have flowers to look at on your birthday,” is what I wrote to her.
So my garden musing leads me to believe that what we feel compelled to do as adults is very often a direct result of consistent input we received as a child. So my love of flowers is, so to speak, in my blood.
—Jonathan Austin