A gome’s garden

Last year, I got interested in gardening, both as an abstract inspirational concept & as in literal gardening. I wrote previously that I think of this site as a sort of digital garden. In the spring, I decided I wanted to have a physical garden as well.

My job is remote and entirely on a computer. Often I find myself interested in physical places of work, and longing for my own physical space in which I do work. There’s a felt sense of belonging and ownership to it that I think is missing if you work in the same place you live the rest of the time. Starting a garden seemed to me like a way of creating that kind of place for myself.

Since I lived in an apartment at the time, I couldn’t really do a full plot in the ground, which is still my dream one day. Fortunately, our unit had a ground-level entrance, so I was able to put a planter box outside it. I spent a lot of time looking at different plants and developing ideas for the arrangement I wanted. My final selection includes a lot of greenery with varied foliage. For the flowers the major colors are bright pink and white, with a bit of yellow from the lantana.

To develop my relationship to them, I gave all my plants names.

• The pink and yellow lantana is Victoria
• The pink geranium is Buffy
• The pink petunia is Shelby
• The ivy is Josef
• The jalapeños are Fani and Fina
• The white alyssums are Spud, Cloud, Peach, and Vince
• The white bacopa is Claudia
• The sprengeri is Gary
• Not a plant, but the gnome on the mushroom is Barvis Mikey Holth

I also wrote an album of songs for them, but since I haven’t gotten around to recording them yet, I will leave that story for another post.

The appeal of the garden as a broader concept is that your role in it is not to control, but to cultivate. It’s a space you can plan and labor over, but the main action of growth is something beyond your power. In literal gardening, you make yourself one part of a larger natural system that supports the flourishing of your plants. Similarly, anything you participate in to bring about a flourishing beyond your control can be thought of as a kind of garden. I think the metaphor extends especially well to developing your inner life as a garden, which I think is how I tend to approach it.

Have you ever tended a garden? Do you have a physical space in which you do work? Do you have any sort of metaphorical garden you cultivate? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.