Why I garden
I have an innate desire to create beauty around me. I love renovating and interior designing projects. I design semi-precious stone jewelry. I paint landscapes, bottles, vases, pots, furniture, and basically anything that is paintable. I sew. I quilt. And I garden. My garden, hands down, is one of the best life-long projects that I have ever undertaken!
I am the most powerful being when I wear my gardening hat! I turn seeds into beautiful flowering bushes of holly hocks. I turn bulbs into gorgeous bouquets of tree lilies. I turn roots into the most fragrant blooms of peonies. I become God when I garden!
It is an art that I create with flowers, bushes, and trees. Unlike in a finished canvas, I can always go back and recreate my landscape to make it more attractive! In fact, that’s what I love most about gardening – being able to create different designs, every gardening season. I never run out of things to do in my garden…
Gardening turns me into a risk-taking, gambling, and experimenting magician, and over the years, I have diligently learned and mastered a bulging bag of tricks that had turned me into a seasoned gardener.
I am a mother to all my plants and trees – even the wildlife that comes with it! I talk to my plants, encourage their efforts, and feel proud of them just like a proper parent. Gardening makes me a lifelong nurturer, and its my most cherished self-identification.
Gardening is my favorite means of being physically active. It helps me to stay in the “now” and breathe deep, just like how yoga does it for me. It gives me plenty fresh-air, and exhaust my pent-up energy on a daily basis. After a day spent in my garden, the wholesome rest I get at night and the quality of sleep that comes with it, is incomparable!
Not only gardening builds my stamina, it teaches me valuable lessons in work ethics, patience, and thrift. In a garden, you learn daily, similar lessons that you come across in any given society.
It gives me the opportunity to bury myself in soil! I love soil! I love its rich color, texture, and smell so much so that it’s engraved in my soul. In spring, I wait for my triple mix soil to be delivered with the same enthusiasm, another would for attaining riches.
I love my fellow work colleagues; bees, worms, butterflies, lady bugs, humming birds, and even snails. It’s the best team I’ve worked with being synergistic and all, in every sense.
Gardening is a way of separating the fake from real attitude. I’ve yet to meet a wishy-washy personality in a gardener! It is definitely not for the faint-of-hearts as you cannot fake the hard work that it requires to become a gardener. It’s not for the shade-lovers. It’s certainly not for the dilly-dalliers.
My garden is where I enter into a meditative state when my mind stills and observes my interactions with plants. The human world disappears when I am among my trees and the plant world takes over, serenading me with peace.
Gardening replicates how things work in our universe. When a plant grows and attains maturity through flowering, seeding, and propagating, it represents the cycle of life from birth to enlightenment to death.
Gardening teaches me how things can come back more beautifully in their rebirth. It shows me how nothing goes to waste and everything has a purpose in life. It teaches me Buddha’s truth, and that my despair over impermanence is a futile endeavor.
Gardening helps me to practice gratitude, embrace humility, and choose hope. I am eternally grateful for the sunshine, rain, and microscopic beings, enriching my garden. I am humbled by the splendor of seasons that color my life. I have hope for humanity when I witness the abundance of our world in a garden.
Most of all, I garden, simply because it makes me the happiest! How about you?