The Gardener

Four times in June I planted rows. Four times savage bunnies chewed them to nubs. 

Brigid O’Donnell

Doesn’t it sound idyllic? Kneeling in the sun beside shining-eyed tots, chubby hands gently settling roots into welcoming earth? Is that… a butterfly that just landed on your child’s breezeswept hair? Your imaginary eyes fill with tears of joy.

LOL.

Sweet moments do exist when gardening with small children. But they’re nestled between other types of moments, like interrupting the five-year-old’s efforts to shampoo himself with dirt and chasing the toddler out of the neighbor's yard.

For the most part, gardening with kids is a shitshow.

As with all identities outside of “parent,” (like, I don’t know, “writer”), your gardening identity gets shoved rudely aside when a baby comes along. The moment you pull on muddy work gloves, the baby needs to be fed, or a small bug launches them into a paroxysm of fear, or the ever-threatening blowout occurs. 

Maybe you haphazardly rush a tomato plant into the soil between feeds and changes. Maybe you pull three weeds. Congrats! That is your garden for the summer!  

Don’t worry: the needy baby will grow. 

“Now,” you think, as the baby transitions into a toddler, “Now is the fun part!” You excitedly show her how to sprinkle seeds in a neatly dug row; she excitedly tramples your row to snatch the seed packet. She yanks a sharp tool your partner dubs “The Eye Piercer” from the tool bucket and stabs holes in your strawberry plant so that she, too, can dump the entire packet of seeds on top of it. 

So maybe not planting, you decide, gingerly removing The Eye Piercer from her clumsy hands and demonstrating instead how to pull a weed. She promptly grasps a daffodil and tears it from the ground.  

“Gahhhh! Go inside, we’ll watch a show,” you shriek, yanking off your gloves and giving up on the garden for another year. Through the remainder of the season, she’ll show you how well she absorbed your lesson about “eating what we grow!” by ripping leaves off random plants and stuffing them into her mouth before you can frantically chase her down.

Don’t give up hope! The incorrigible toddler will grow. 

“I want to help!” cries the preschooler. 

“Finally,” you think, “Here we go!”  

But before you can begin, she wants her own set of gloves, her own kneeling pad, her own shovel. You sacrifice all of your gardening equipment and use a hand rake in lieu of a shovel while she digs cavernous holes in the dirt for… why again? Weren’t you weeding? You can’t recall because you’ve had another baby and now this one is in the stroller wailing and you haven’t slept properly in months.

It’s okay. The Gardener in you, and the garden itself, may lie dormant for a time. Fallow years lead to lush ones.

Last spring, as my third child turned two, I surveyed my garden patch with ambitious eyes.

“This,” I thought, “is the Year of The Garden!” 

With our youngest edging out of babyhood and our older two entering full-fledged kid-dom, my husband and I began to slowly rekindle our own identities. It had been six years since I’d properly gardened, but now in this, the Year of The Garden, I would grow a masterpiece.

I mapped and planned and ordered seeds from a catalog. I prepped the beds during naps and TV time; I read books about vegetables and roses. My husband even offered to support me through a master gardener program.

Then, as April thawed the earth, widespread supply chain issues and labor shortages—the pandemic's lingering gifts—meant my cool-weather crop seeds didn’t come.

“That’s okay,” I assured myself. “There’s plenty of time.”

But then: as May sprouted, our whole family contracted COVID. Between trading illness and kid-care with my partner for the next four weeks, I managed to stick some seeds in the Earth, pell-mell. I certainly couldn’t weed, water, or tend them.  

Nonetheless, some grew, as seeds in earth do.

But then: the most prolific bunny season you’ve ever seen. They ate everything. Carrot tops, coreopsis, cosmo and zinnia sprouts… everything. Saddest of all: the green beans. Four times in June I planted rows. Four times savage bunnies chewed them to nubs.  

“Okay,” I thought, recovered now in July. “All is not lost. I can buy seedlings.”  I propped up a few volunteer tomato plants and tried my best to beat back the tangle of weeds. I planned to visit a garden center for more seedlings. Beans, perhaps?

But then. We got a phone call.  

Our adopted son had a new baby brother. This new baby brother needed a home.

With that, our youngest was now a squalling newborn. So much for The Year of The Garden.

Resignedly, I paid a landscaper to pull out the weeds that were all I really had to show for my efforts and blanket it with a thick layer of mulch. I planted a sunflower and a coneflower in the sad empty patch. I said goodbye to my Year of The Garden dreams. It wasn’t meant to be.

But then.

As summer tipped toward fall, my attention consumed by baby care and work and school prep, something happened. The scraggly tomato weeds I’d propped up grew into wild, productive vines. The rabbit-chewed zinnias, more resilient than I’d realized, phoenixed from chewed-up nubs into tall, bright blossoms. The marigolds I’d planted as a protective border that had thus far 1) failed to protect anything and 2) stubbornly refused to bloom, burst into two-foot tall flowers, orange as the sun. The coneflowers and sunflowers I’d planted as a sad consolation prize grew prolific and bright.  And the thick layer of “fuck-it” mulch successfully smothered the weeds.

My failed garden was breathtaking.

I didn’t pull fresh produce last fall. I couldn’t can the beans that never sprouted, or pull cute carrots that never grew. But the wild lush of it all could be seen from the road, inspiring passersby. It soothed me as I soothed the newborn, bouncing and shushing at the kitchen window. It worshiped on my behalf when I didn’t have the time, space, or energy to worship.  

It wasn’t the garden I had planned. It didn’t go the way I wanted. 

This isn’t the life I had planned either. I never intended to raise a fourth child. I didn’t set out to adopt a sibling group, work in marketing, live in small-town Michigan. Nothing is going right.

But every once in a while, I step back and actually look at it. Through some alchemy of the seeds I planted and the work that failed, it grew into something beautiful.