Grow Where You're Broken
And other things my garden told me
I went out to (finally) harvest some cherries this morning, and returned to the breakfast table with a scant handful. “Well, that’s it for the year!” I chirped at my kid and husband as they ate their breakfast. This was not the harvest we had hoped for in mid-spring when the old tree was a fragrant cloud of blossoms, nor was it the bounty we dreamed of in late spring when the green cherries clustered the branch ends like plump neon jewels. Chris looked at me, incredulous, and I shrugged. “We missed the window, and the hail didn’t leave us much anyway.” In past years, we’ve harvested over a hundred pounds, easily—and invited friends to harvest to their heart’s content, too. This wasn’t one of those years.
Gardening, farming, and fruit trees especially have taught me not to expect anything until the day of harvest. And even then, the fruit might be full of worms. Literally.
Every year has its signature, and this year’s has been wonderfully looping and curved, a single phrase unfurled across the top of each month like a header:
—Nothing is Guaranteed—
I primarily identify as a gardener, and almost everything else is secondary. Dirt under my fingernails means I’m in a good place. Cut flower arrangements perch cheerfully atop every table in the house during warm months. In winter, I can often be found sketching out spring garden plans and buying seeds. We feast on my earthy labors year-round, from a freezer and pantry stocked with dried, canned, frozen, and otherwise preserved bounty from the potager and orchard. In short, my capacity to grow food and flowers is intrinsic to my being, and the garden guides my seasonal diet, physical activity, and philosophy.
Some people raise gardens, but in so many ways, gardening raised me. My gardens and the farm I once scratched out of the earth in Texas gave me patience, resilience, flexibility, and endurance. Row crops instructed me about generosity—planting enough to share with insects, birds, and squirrels. Farming taught me how to ask for help when I needed it. That it is possible to both grieve losses and grow from them. Most of all, it demonstrated what it means to truly inhabit the earth, to live close enough to it to feel our pulses intertwined.
But an attachment to the earth also means always keeping an eye on the weather. It astonished me, time and again after a debilitating storm downed trees and knocked out electricity at the farm, how clients in the city would bemusedly ask, “Oh, did it rain last night?” Or how after a season of torrential rains and floods some would say, “Oh you must be loving all this rain!” never even imagining the horror of garlic bulbs rotting in the ground or knee-deep water flowing over the land, dotted with floating islands of fire ants. To be connected to the land is to recognize how wildly out of our hands nature is, and how vulnerable we are to her wrath. To be disconnected from nature is to act with impunity, godlike, to imagine we are separate from the earth that sustains us and will one day swallow us back into her body.
Recently, a freak hail storm hit us, the week after the surprise ending of my decades-long closest friendship, in the middle of my 6-year-old daughter’s worst-yet bout with illness. At that moment, I felt a sort of hollowed-out panic. Charlie, awakened by the din of golfball-sized hail stones bombarding the house, asked to eat something for the first time in days. Her fever broke. She asked to see the hail, and we sat in front of the window (but not too close) witnessing the seemingly endless assault of ice, me grimacing, and her placidly munching a rice cake. Night fell. I didn’t survey the damage outside until morning. But what I found was gutting.
It had been an especially proud spring of massive, backbreaking garden expansion and nonstop landscape improvement. So, as I took stock of the lettuces shredded to salad; the trellised snow peas sheared in half, mid-climb; and the hard green peaches carpeting the ground along with most of the peachtree leaves…it hurt viscerally. As if some vital part of me had been ripped out, trampled on, my time squandered, and my hopes dashed to pieces.
Returning to the kitchen to prepare our traditional Saturday morning pancakes, my mood was sour. I snapped at Charlie. When Chris suggested that the damage might not be that bad, I cut him off sharply. Flipping the golden pancakes, I caught a glimpse of my daughter’s face, her little frown reflecting mine. She’d been so sick for the last several days, and we had been so worried. Shouldn’t I be happy to have her at the table? What was I doing? Taking out my disappointment on the people I love doesn’t reflect the type of partner/parent/person I want to be. And so, with a deep breath, I reminded myself that what happens to us is often outside of our control, but how we react is up to us. This is the “choose your own” adventure part of life.
Something internally snapped into place. I served breakfast cheerfully, strategizing the rest of the day. I had a huge mess to clean up in the garden and the determination to do it and move on.
It took a meteorological kick in the ass to clean up all the parts of the garden I’d dragged my feet on clearing: the too-many poppies in most of the vegetable beds, the brassicas I’d intentionally let go to seed (don’t judge, it’s hard to find lacinato kale seeds around here!!), and the fall plantings I’d let linger longer than necessary. One might be led to believe that I’m bad at letting go, but my excuse is that I love giving the pollinators something to feast on in early spring.
The bottom line was that the hailstorm did so much damage that it left no reason to keep the shredded flowers and remaining fall plants. The weather made some decisions for me, and within mere hours I was grateful for the push.
The storm was a month ago, and today I marveled at the current lushness of the new growth springing forth from the tomatoes that had been broken in half, the decimated snow peas, and was reminded of the first time I pruned roses, back in college. You cut near a growth node in winter and are rewarded by strong, beautiful roses on hardy stems in the spring. But the work feels like butchery—if you’ve done it correctly, half the plant is left on the ground. What remains looks tragic, diminished.
It isn’t. If you want strong and healthy growth, you must prune. My friend Doreen told me that in Dutch, they say, “snoeien en groeien,” which has a great ring to it. Pruning is a quasi-magic trick, removing old, dead, and diseased growth to allow a plant to direct its energy to healthy new growth. It’s the same principle behind deadheading flowers to force flowers late into the season.
When my closest friendship ended last month, after much contemplation, I decided that it was a bittersweet opportunity for me—an invitation to deepen my relationships with new friends here, where I am rooted, in France. A pruning. It hurts, but it was a cut above a growth node, I can feel it.
The French do more extensive pruning on their trees than any other culture. The first year or so here, I felt sorry for the pollarded plane trees, their gnarled branch ends clenched like bony white fists clutching at the winter sky. The plaintive vibe angered me, convinced these beleaguered trees were doomed. This feeling was tenfold when one of our neighbors cut back their roadside oaks several years ago—butchered them, artlessly, chopped almost in two, their bare trunks reaching tragically for the sky.
In both cases—the neighbor’s oaks and pretty much every pollarded plane tree in every town square—despite disfigurement, the trees burst into leaf gloriously each spring, vibrant with life, shaped by blade and human hand, and apparently healthy. What do I know? I’m only a landscape architect, not an arborist!
We are living in the middle of a climate crisis, with weather becoming less predictable than ever before on a local and global basis. Politically, things are in upheaval all over the map. These are not unrelated situations. To live gracefully in these times, we are going to have to be adaptable. We need to see where we can prune, which growth nodes to stimulate to create the best outcomes.
When I look at my garden, it is clear how a massively destructive event has yielded some of the healthiest growth I’ve ever seen. How where one stem was broken, two grew in its place, stronger and more determined than the original. I don’t recommend life-changing breakups or natural disasters, but I do recognize that sometimes when something is destroyed, it makes space for something else to flourish.
Last week, I read The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff, and it fanned the flames at my core, where I believe all things that live are determined to continue living, regardless of the circumstances at hand. This striving toward life is a phenomenon that amazes and delights me, even at its most tragic or hopeless. It is, in my humble opinion, the basis of why life continues to have value: because we choose to see it as valuable. I hope you are kindling that flame in yourself, your gardens, and all the many aspects of your existence that require care and feeding.
Viva la spring!
That was beautiful . Thank you.
This is so beautiful and raw, and echoes so many emotions that have been bubbling at the surface lately, that keen sense of love and loss and a growing awareness of the grief that comes when you realize that a relationship that once seemed foundational is no longer there and your world feels a bit shifty. Thank you for adding shape and definition to my experience by sharing your own. I long to see your garden and this life you’ve created for yourselves in France. Not if but when.❤️