In My Garden of Solitude

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Like many of you I’ve been watching the reports coming out of Ferguson, Missouri anxiously. I was up hours past my bedtime last night rhythmically refreshing social media over and over. What is happening now? What is happening now? What is happening now? This morning I was up early and spent the first few hours reading every article I could find. In case you’re interested, these are some of the articles that I found most useful:

There came a moment mid morning when I found myself stood in the kitchen, staring down at my phone while making a coffee. I looked up for a moment and turned my head to look out at the garden. I needed an emotional reset and my brain seemed to know instinctively where to get it. My shoulders dropped in relief almost instantly. I stepped out towards the garden, lifted my phone up and took the above picture. I posted the image to my Instagram account with the following words, “I grow a garden (food for the body and the eyes) because it provides some small sense of agency. It is my sanctuary.” Immediately, I wanted to amend or at least add to what I’d written. My garden as a physical space is a sanctuary, but so (possibly more importantly) is the act of gardening itself.

I garden in the city and I have grown plants in all sorts of different spaces. No matter how diverse my gardens have been, they often share the attribute of being surrounded by chaos. Over at the community garden it was the hum of industrial beer fridges and drunk men fighting in the alley. There I sometimes did my chores with one hand on my cellphone, just in case. On the roof it was planes, trains, automobiles, and bar-hopping revellers. At my street garden it was, well, everything. That garden was right out on a frenetic street corner. There was never a moment’s quiet there. Here, in what passes in photographs for a peaceful backyard, it is not. My happy place is continuously interrupted by the usual litany of urban ruckus with the addition of neighbours who scream at top volume and threaten their kids all the live long day, and territorial, feral cats that conjure up guttural sounds that cause the hairs on my arms to stand on end.

The dictionary defines a sanctuary as, “a place of refuge or safety.” The urban gardens of my past nor my garden now meet this definition by any stretch. At least not in the literal sense, and not when I think of them as physical spaces. However, where they have and do act as sanctuaries is in my mind. Engaging in the act of gardening pushes me into a different mind-state than the one that I walk around with. I am here in this space fully connecting with the earth before me, yet I am also inside my own head. There is a peaceful familiarity that I have cultivated over years of gardening that has transformed the physical tasks of garden work into a moving meditation of sorts. As I dig in the soil, crouch down to plant a seed, or reach out to prune a stem, my limbs fall into stride in the same ways that they have many times before. This familiarity allows my mind to wander inside itself. When that happens I find I am able to mostly block out the chaos around me and I enter this garden mind space as if I were alone; the din of neighbours, planes, and wailing cats recede into the background. Inside my very own garden of solitude my mind is free to wander, process, assess, work shit out. In here I am able to retreat from the world into a peaceful quiet, despite the fact that the world is still buzzing around me.

The garden works on my life in other ways, too. It wakes me up to my potential. I accomplish things in the garden that remind me, Hey, you can do this. It lets me know that I am an adult with agency, and that I have some ability to affect the environment I live in. The garden teaches me, too, that I have a responsibility to how I put power into action. What I do here, as well as in the rest of my life, carries real consequences.

While the garden provides an education in how to be an adult citizen of the world, it connects with the little girl inside me. The garden taps into my child brain and whispers in my ear that there is still room for wonder, discovery, and play in grown up life. Muscle memory leads to real memories of digging for clay and ant nests, chasing insects, peeling back bark, and crouching down low to look inside a red tulip. It is here in this place that I am most myself. Not who I was told I was then or who I am supposed to be now. In the gardens of my childhood I kept my truest self safely hidden from the prying, hurtful eyes, words, hands of the adults in charge. They had no use for the garden and left me alone there. Most of my early years were spent in a loud and crowded subdivision with little around me that passed for nature, yet I was never so free as those moments that were spent alone pulling the veins out of a plantain stem, plucking slimy night crawlers off the lawn, and searching the schoolyard for 4-leaf clovers. Now, at 40, I can still find that freedom of self whenever I lose my way, my confidence, or my sense of hope in the world. All I have to do is pick up the watering can in my office, step out the back door, or turn my gaze towards a plant and she is right there where I left her. In the garden.

Gayla Trail
Gayla is a writer, photographer, and former graphic designer with a background in the Fine Arts, cultural criticism, and ecology. She is the author, photographer, and designer of best-selling books on gardening, cooking, and preserving.

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21 thoughts on “In My Garden of Solitude

  1. Absolutely beautiful. What an awesome post… it actually brought tears to my eyes. My garden is often physically surrounded by chaos, and by no means an idyllic place of natural refuge. But just being in it, or tending to it, brings peace to my being like nothing else.

    • Years ago I read that just looking at a plant lowers the heart rate… I figure surrounding yourself has got to do good things regardless of the overall context! I know that when I grew in a greenhouse community I could be in the worst, most foul mood on the way and it would instantly lift the second I stepped inside.

  2. This is a very beautiful piece of writing. On top of being a great gardener you are also a gifted writer Gayla and I hope one day you’ll have the time to write a novel or your memoir.

    • Thanks so much for saying that. I want to write a memoir-ish book and I do a lot of that writing without publishing or using it in any way… It’s not really a matter of time these days; it’s fear that stands in the way. Even publishing a small piece like this provokes anxiety.

  3. What a lovely and moving post. I also garden in the inner city where I often contend with fighting outside the gate, liquor bottles littering the entrance and occasional graffiti and vandalism. I work with inner city youth to grow healthy foods that we prepare together into something delicious. There are times, when the garden is so peaceful and such a place of love and harmony that I almost forget where we are located and that racism, poverty and violence exist at all. I hope that my students feel this too- even for a short while.

    • I hope they do too. The garden can be such a healthy reprieve from the troubles of the world. I think that the sense of confidence, self knowledge, and self-sufficiency that it can bring to people are some of its more subversive attributes…. if one can get past the stigma of slave farm labour that is associated with it historically.

  4. This is beautiful. I feel this way about my kitchen, too. In times of crisis I retreat to the kitchen where the motions are familiar, the heat and smells are comforting, and I can care for the ones I love by feeding them.

  5. You put what is in many of our hearts into lovely language. Gardening is the nurturing of life and is joy giving in so many ways. I was struck by your friend Margaret Roach’s blog post today about the seed library legal dilemma because the gardeners were coming together in solution and not just in anger. They see the truth in growing and preserving our diverse seeds/plants.

    Oh – and don’t doubt your writing ;)

  6. Hi, Gayla. I truly appreciated this post. I was almost scared to read the comments for fear of what might have been said about the horrid situation in Ferguson. It did my heart so much good to see that the comments were all about the peace that gardening brings. You also hit on a note that struck a chord with me. I have been growing my own food for 8 years now and it is my goal to have a 5 acre farm one day. I want to teach people how to grow their own food. Unfortunately, many in my race (I’m Black) laugh at my passion for growing food and say they have no desire to go back to slavery. It hurts me to my heart that something that was as natural as breathing to my grandparents (growing food and preserving it) is always associated with slavery with a certain faction of my race. I find such peace in my backyard farm, as I call it. I even added four chickens to the mix and there is nothing more satisfying to my soul than letting the girls forage in the backyard while I weed the garden. Thank you for sharing your heart. You have no idea how much it meant to me.

    • Thank you for commenting Audra, Your comment struck a cord. I’ve discussed this with a few people, i.e. how gardening can be equated with slavery and slave labour… I get it. We are barely a few generations away from slavery and as for slave wage farm labour… there is no generational distance as that continues now. Within that context it is easy to see the garden as another trap and a place of servitude.

      My maternal side is West Indian and I can trace my lineage back to slaves and slave owners. And yet my grandmother always grew something to eat, even when she didn’t have a garden. I don’t know what she got from it — she never told me. It just was. She just did it. I can only assume that in some ways it gave her what my garden gives me. https://www.yougrowgirl.com/the-requirement-to-garden/

      As I responded to Susan above: Gardening carries with it a strong subversive element. Among so many other things, it provides confidence, self-sufficiency, and can lead to self knowledge. When you grow your own garden you are benefiting yourself and doing it on your own terms. It is not the same as slavery. If only we can see past the immediate connection and understand how much lies underneath.

  7. I stumbled on the link for your post while waking up this morning. What a great article to greet my day Gayla! thanks for sharing your thoughts and your sanctuary with us. I’m a wanna be gardener, the task seems overwhelming at times but reading about what your garden gives to you spiritually is inspiring.

    • Thanks Maria, As I said years ago in “There’s Joy in Hard Work” [https://www.yougrowgirl.com/theres-joy-in-hard-work/] Sometimes it is brutally difficult and challenging, but I still love it. Sometimes it is even in the difficult stuff that i find the greatest rewards. I think that gardening can sometimes challenge us in exactly the ways we need to be challenged.

  8. Wanting to write a “memoir-ish book” is half the equation. I know you can do it Gayla. You have the stories bursting to come out and the ability to write them. Pitch your idea to a publisher and get writing. I look forward to reading the published results.

    • I find that the desire to is more like a tenth of the equation. Nowhere near halfway! Regardless, I don’t mean a gardening book. I have other stories to tell. However, I can’t just pitch a memoir or novel and expect a publisher to buy it… I’m not a celebrity. It’s not the same as it is for nonfiction how-to books. The writing isn’t the same for me either. With nonfiction I mostly know where I am going. I draw up a plan and often have a path laid out (via notes) with the exception of a few diversions when they happen. With other forms of writing (even the piece on this page) I often don’t know where I am going. Sometimes I don’t know the beginning. Sometimes I know literally nothing until the words come out of my hands. The story unfolds within the act of writing (even my own stories. The ones that are about true things that happened to me). I don’t preplan and write my way to a predetermined conclusion. As mentioned, I write loads all of the time… there are pages and pages of words that are never used, will never be used, and were never written with the intention that they would become something specific. It’s so much more than just a matter of setting my mind to it. I have a strong work ethic. That’s not my hurdle. I appreciate that you have confidence in me.

  9. My great, great, great grandfather found himself living on a slave plantation in Grenada with his mother. Never knew who his father was. As a young man he had to make things happen for both of them. With the purchase of two donkeys and a wooden cart attached to the donkeys, he carried stuff from small shops to the homes of people who needed that service. With that money he purchased lands off that plantation on which I grew up. Life for him was very, very hard, but it thought him discipline and the knowledge that hard work will not kill him. There were those who were killed by that hard work though. He was the lucky few.
    I grew up on 10 acres of land of land with a river running through. His experience on the plantation did not leave a sour taste in his mouth, and out of the gutters of slavery I am produced. I love gardening and learned a lot from my father. Living in the USA for 30 years gave me a new perspective on land ownership and the Decendents of Slaves………….read about the ” 40 acres and a mule” promise, and learned even more about the relation between the land and the people who were forced to work it, sometimes under the most horrible conditions one can imagine. As I sometime say to others, I am of the Land, I am the Land, and I love the Land.
    I know that my great, great, great grand father would be proud of my relationship with the land, growing my own food and enjoy the solitude it provides me.
    Gayla, thanks for your post.
    I watched the Ferguson situation on http://www.democracynow.org/ this morning. It took me all the way back to the slave plantations of the Americas. That mentality still prevails.
    Here in the Windward Islands we are experience the Rainy Season. Thanks goodness we can grow something 360 days of the year.

  10. It’s a beautiful garden! I would love to have such a green garden full of flowers. I’ve seen many houses and gardens and I agree that the owner and his garden should be somehow connected. In the end, garden can and should be the place for a small escape to spend some time only with your family or just yourself.

    • Wow, thanks for sending this. I assume this is true, although it seems almost unbelievable in terms of what they’d have to do to make this happen. It’s amazing and just goes to show what solace gardening can bring. The article mentioned gardening in POW camps and I had never heard that bit of history before.

  11. The process of creating–in your case, gardening–is so important to self care. I love what you have written in these two open-hearted posts. Your insight is so refreshing! Love to find blogs with writers who want to stay real. I am completely blown away by your writing and your honesty. Thank you!

    I wrote recently(ish) about the importance of self-care and staying honest and human while blogging. You convey so many of these important qualities! Here’s the link: http://www.creativeclementine.com/2014/07/in-defense-of-the-humanblogger.html

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