Gardening Could Be Key to Your Creativity

“You make so many mistakes in the garden and you just keep going, which is a parallel to creativity.” Manuela de los Rios, https://growdundee.blog

I didn’t like to garden for most of my life. My mother, with whom I had an ongoing power struggle from the time I was very young, made it into one of my chores, and I just didn’t see the point of toiling in the hot, humid Wisconsin summers weeding dandelions and planting stuff while swatting mosquitoes simply to make her happy. So for years, I resisted doing anything that involved growing vegetation, and bargained my way out of it by offering to mow the grass. At least that appealed to the obsessive-compulsive part of my personality and had a set time commitment to it.

Years later when I had my own home, I was married to someone who had a passion for gardening. We made our yard into something of a tropical paradise (in the summer anyway), not an easy task in the upper Midwest U.S., and I began to see the benefits of planting stuff and standing back to see what happened next. But I was still not fully invested, admiring the results, but shrugging them off as just another part of being a good homeowner.

We moved to California after our kids grew up, and now are in the Los Angeles area. We bought plants to festoon the entrance to our apartment, and my husband Larry began an elaborate garden on our tiny balcony. After a few months, we noticed that the fig plant that graced our entryway (which was in shade 24/7) began to fail.

Something inside me clicked open, and I tenderly carried the drooping fig inside. An invisible hand was guiding me as I walked it around the apartment, and I finally felt compelled to put it down next to the balcony sliding doors. 

“Here?” I asked, almost expecting an answer.

It felt right, so I found a nice stand for the beleaguered plant. And lo and behold, after several weeks of mourning each time it lost another leaf, it looked like it was reviving.

I began checking on it every day, as if it was a child with the flu, and noticed after several weeks that it was putting out some new growth. The feeling of satisfaction about these little green nubs surprised me, and I looked around for people to share the news with.  I became even more attentive. Over time, the plant seemed to telegraph that it needed another location, and I took it to a South facing window. There, it thrived, and began to look like the healthy ficus it was meant to be.

Needless to say, the gardening bug had (finally) bitten me, and I was hooked. I’m not saying I’m good at it, but I am fascinated by it, and creatively, it consumes part of my time and emotional energy. Anyone who has gardened knows the feeling of losing one of the members of the tribe, and it really hurts! But, as a new gardener, I realize that one has to respect nature and how it works. In fact, that’s part of the education and even fun of it.

One of the great things about gardening is that you can play and do what you want, and no matter what happens, you will learn from it. 

Think of this: as a gardener, you will be connecting with nature, which is vast and deep, and has many lessons to impart. Even if you can’t or don’t want to garden, go for an “awe” walk, and notice the remarkable way nature has of carrying on, no matter what. This is the reason writer Henry David Thorough went to live in nature - he didn’t want to miss anything that nature could teach him that was potentially important to his existence. 

Plants have no ego, and this is a good reminder for human beings. We typically  go around comparing ourselves to every other ego around us, and usually end up dissatisfied and exhausted. Plants remind us that we can access silence, meditation and non-judgment without our internal self constantly weighing how we’re measuring up. In nature, we can simply be, and experience a stillness that’s hard to access in today’s world.

What plants do have is vast intelligence. It has been shown, for instance, that a mother tree will do things to deliberately protect her young, or saplings, if they come under any kind of attack. Plants can communicate through their root systems, and this is a fairly new scientific field to figure out how this happens and what, exactly, is getting said. 

My sister-in-law Sandra has a spectacular garden on her California patio (photo below), and she says she goes out to “putter” in it every morning. By that I think she means she connects with the plants, and therefore with the creative field of energy, where time disappears and we are in a state of bliss.

And this is another great thing about gardening - when it comes to design, there are no rules! You can let your imagination run wild, and then sit back and learn from the results. You will be an author, a composer, an artist - and you can let your creativity do its own thing. Your garden will not resemble anyone else’s garden, I guarantee it. Painter Claude Monet built his own Giverny garden outside Paris so he would have many scenes to paint, and that garden is one of the most-visited and beloved sites in France today!

Even if you’re someone who claims they just look at plants, and the poor things wilt away, keep trying. You will learn why plants respond to you this way, and you will get better. It seems that anyone should be able to garden without experience, but this simply isn’t true. Like many other endeavors, it takes doing, study, time and effort. Give yourself these things, and you will be rewarded many times over with creative results that will satisfy your soul.