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Image is a detail from a gouache painting I made in 2021.

OOoo gardening, what an original thing to write about. But it’s a popular subject for a reason! There’s something so—as far as we know—human about the attempt to communicate a lived experience directly to others through some art form: prose, poetry, painting… blogging. I think that for so many creative types like me, gardening elicits that very human desire to communicate what we’re experiencing precisely because it is not innately human; it awakens a connection to a more ancient sense of being a living thing, an organism not any more special than the rest, utterly entwined with the others that inhabit our very special home planet. In a time and place where that feeling is increasingly rare, where food comes to us in plastic packaging with ever-disheartening price tags after it’s been plucked from a biological monolith and shipped some hulking distance, it feels like a secret—almost forbidden—that, yes, food can be grown; yes, food is alive. Of course we want to tell each other about it.

Gardening, agriculture, cultivating other living things for some communal purpose—grub, garb, etc.—is a practice we share with so many others across the tree of life. Here in Animalia, our beetle cousins tend to fungus gardens and our fish cousins defend and support massive algae lawns , to name just two agriculturalist species. Over in the strange world of Fungi, where I spend a lot of my time, mycorrhizal fungi nurture plants on an incomprehensibly massive scale that Big Ag can only dream of. There’s a well-supported theory, that kind of like how there would be no morphologically mutilated snuffling French bulldogs without us, there would likely be no land plants if not for fungi.

Beyond the concept of it, when I’m tending to my own garden, lost in the deliciously dirty act of it, I feel like a damselfish picking the algal competitors off my rock lush with my chosen crop of green filaments. I forget for a while that I’m an adult human with all these supposedly important things demanding my attention. It feels like nothing else matters. I want to eat. This plant will not feed me *pluck*; this bug is eating my food *flick*; this bug is eating the bugs that eat my food *thank*. I move through my spiraling rows, Great Ape that I am, stooped over with my stomach resting on my thighs and knuckles in the dirt, making small, easy decisions, over and over and over.

And, by God, isn’t it a release.

My garden is fulfilling, of course in a nutritional sense, but also in a personal sense. In late March, I started three trays of seedlings indoors, even taking the time to re-pot each one a few weeks later, before putting them in the ground in May. I made a lot of mistakes. The individual re-potting of 60+ seedlings was totally unnecessarily, which I did anyway with the assistance of my sweet partner who went along with my insistence that it was totally necessary. The seedlings still prominently held their cotyledons, barely past their first set of true leaves, even until I planted them in the ground. I was just so excited they sprouted; they’ll make it, I thought. Then I got busy in the lab, and I skipped two sunny days of watering, which is very ill-advised for seedlings at that stage. I just didn’t know any better, despite being employed as an academic in a plant sciences department (that’s a whole other essay). They all died. Every single one!

This meant that in early June, my plot was littered with measly seedlings that I had sown directly into the ground on top of the mass grave that was my first attempt, while it felt like the rest of the plots in our community garden were filling with life: huge, sprawling cucurbit leaves, beans and vine-type tomatoes starting to climb trellises, and garlic shoots reaching for the clouds. But soon enough, with a couple healthy doses of composted cow poop and consistent watering and weeding, my plot joined the ranks.

Now I garden a few times a week, watering as needed and going through the ritual of moving through my plants and weeding, which now requires careful steps to make footfall in the few areas of ground not occluded by growth. There are so many flowers, and so many fruits. And I’m so f*cking proud of them. I thought this feeling was reserved for accomplishments deemed major by the faceless societal powers-that-be like finally finishing my Ph.D. Yet, here I am, swelling with pride and unable to shut up about my garden, something that a lot of people, as I’ve learned, don’t even consider an accomplishment, but rather a redundant undertaking deterring me from the modern human purpose of Maximum Efficiency.

Yet, the feeling persists. Just like the weeds, who are constantly reminding me of life’s persistence. In a few dozen square feet of dirt, with a few dozen hours of being an organism actively engaged in symbiosis, I have become so full. I wonder if damselfish and Ambrosia beetles feel this too. Maybe it’s just me and the other garden bloggers.