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Column: Dropping acorns, casting filaments

I’m always surprised at the lessons I learn working in the garden. It has been a wonderful teacher for me, at the worst of times. In the process of uncovering the delicate crowns of forthcoming perennials, I realized a few things.
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Sedum Crowns are the first sign of spring in Greenboots' Garden. They represent "hope" for a lovely gardening season ahead. Photo by Anne Boulton.
I’m always surprised at the lessons I learn working in the garden. It has been a wonderful teacher for me, at the worst of times.

In the process of uncovering the delicate crowns of forthcoming perennials, I realized a few things. Over the course of 2015, I’ve been dropping many “acorns.” That is, I’ve been casting forth “filament upon filament” like poet Walt Whitman’s “noiseless, patient spider,” in the hopes of catching onto something worthwhile upon which to grow.

Change. New opportunities. Bends in the road of life — you get the idea. Each of those filaments or dropped acorns (choose a metaphor and I’ll promise to stop mixing them) holds the promise of a fresh start, an opportunity to learn something new, and yet, in the very process of hoping for newness, something happens that changes you. Call it hope. Call it the arrival of experience.

A part of you changes irrevocably for the better for having at least tried. Didn’t McMurphy say it best in Ken Kesey's “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”? After wrestling to pull the water fountain from its place on the floor and failing, he is met with derisive laughter from the others. His response? “But I tried, didn't I? …At least I did that.”

I had been feeling anxious that none of my acorns would thrive. That perhaps all of life was futile and that the capitalistic promise of reward for hard work was a lie.

Joan Baez sang, “I get myself to work by eight but oh, was I born too late, do you think I'll fail at every single thing I try?”

I wonder the same thing and yet mostly aim to talk myself out of those impossible feelings. One needs, in both gardening and in life, to have “glacial patience,” as singer Neko Case wisely puts it.

I was at the point where now I simply had to wait to see fruition. There was nothing more for me to do.

Bending down low in my garden, I uncovered some of my latest plantings: day lilies and hot papaya coneflower. Here were some “acorns”, dropped in, late autumn, in the hopes that they’d spring forth with warmer weather to produce a worthy show.

But alas, the papaya coneflower didn’t overwinter. Even after I’d cut back its blooms to ensure a good strong root growth. Digging around in the garden, it struck me that this “loss” wasn’t exactly that.

That even though I had put my hopes into this small plant and it had perished, its very roots would become nourishment for the ground, and possibly, for the day lily bulbs that were planted next to it.

It struck me in the way only a good garden metaphor can: That any acorns of hope that I plant, whether they make it or not, encourage me to keep planting. If the coneflower didn’t make it, something else would need to fill its spot. Hope begets hope. Or something like that.

What have you learned from your garden? Is it to enjoy the process? Or perhaps to take pleasure in life’s small surprises? Maybe you like worms now, when before you didn’t.

Whatever it is, pay attention; your garden is trying to tell you something.

Anne Boulton is an avid gardener who lives in Sudbury.

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