I always used to be intimidated by gardening. The thought of developing any skills of creative gardening was chased away by proof that I had a hard time keeping plants alive.
But then something changed.
I stopped telling myself that I didn’t have a green thumb, and started telling myself there was no such thing as a green thumb.
Everything has a season. Everything has its place in life.
When I was little, my family never referred to gardening as gardening. We called it yard work. It was so hot and humid in Florida, and I never got to plant pretty things. I was mainly put on weed duty.
You know, a girl can only take so many bugs crawling through her fingers while she picks at pesky weeds before she throws the gloves off and begs her parents to go back in to the air conditioning.
It wasn’t until I started paying attention to Ecclesiastes, and then later, dove into Voltaire’s Candide, that the idea of cultivating, of gardening, of life and seasons and experience began to show me that the act of digging in the dirt and merely trying to love and tend to living things was green thumb enough.
Creative gardening, for me, is not about diy garden art or succulents in bird cages (although those things can be fun too).
Creative gardening is looking at every growing season as a learning experience for me in creativity.
When we lived in Atlanta, I would sit in the dining room, pouring over my seed catalogs and mapping out my vegetable garden in the winter, anticipating the coming of spring and excited to devote sections of my garden beds to the glorious color of pink.
Disconnecting from the internet and the simple act of shopping from a paper catalog allowed me to stretch my mind and challenged myself to not only plan, but to imagine.
The result, for me, was the celebration of God’s gift to witness beauty from dust, and the ability to create art just by taking care of it, or photographing it, or sharing it with loved ones.
