Graves to Gardens
By now, most of you know my flower story. You know that I started growing flowers in 2019 because I was partly inspired by an article I read about Floret and partly because I was grieving some personal losses. I had big dreams for that 2019 garden. I have no idea how many seeds I bought with high hopes, only to be met with pretty much abject failure. The Zinnias and Celosia were the only things that grew, along with a few scraggly Dahlias. I also swore that summer that I would never be a flower farmer. A few weeks later Dad had his stroke. It is still hard to put the utter loss and grief into words, and in spite of much counseling, I still deal with trauma reactions from that time. The one place I could find peace during that time was my garden. When I was out there, I felt like my brain could quite and I could just be.
After that season, I initially did not have a lot of plans of revisiting a garden, but in the winter and spring, I experienced several more losses and upheavals. By the time summer was coming around, we were all fully immersed in the pandemic, and I still had a lot of Zinnia seeds from the year before. So, I planted Zinnias and a few Dahlias. I cannot tell you how many Zinnias I harvested that year, and I cannot tell you why or when I started falling in love with the Dahlias. If I am being honest, their beauty captivated me. So, per my nature, I ran after Dahlias full force. That following season, I did not plant any seeds, just Dahlias, and I went from maybe 6 to over 60.
That year, I also went to a Dahlia festival in Washington state. It was an incredible trip. I got to see Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, all of the Pacific Northwest beauty, and Triple Wren’s stunning flower farm. Weeks later, I was sharing about the trip with a friend. As I was telling her about some of the places I visited, she made an off-handed comment, which became the birth of the idea for Well Watered Gardens. Suddenly, my brain was swimming with all of the ideas, small picture, big picture, hopes, and dreams. As the dreams grew, so did my realization that time in the garden correlated with relief from the loss, grief, and pain. Time in the garden gave me a renewed heart.
Last year, I got serious about flower farming. It was quite at first because I was still unsure, but it grew more than I could have imagined. I realized that God was inviting me into the place that I have always been meant to occupy, that I was being invited into living on the line of two fields that are seemingly unrelated, but might actually have more to do with one another than most of us could have ever realized. I will be honest. I do not know the science. I do not know if studies have even been done to connect loss and mental health to the healing power of the garden. But what I do know is that God is so incredibly intentional in His design of our world and its story. God’s story with humanity started with a beautiful, hand-planted garden, a place where He could connect with people. Since then the natural world has been filled with reminders of what the world was supposed to be and of what we were supposed to be. Every Winter, we feel the loss and emptiness of the world going gray, but hold onto hope because we know Spring will come and things will be reborn. Maybe that is why gardening comforts those of us who grieve. The garden reminds us that death is not the end of the story. The death of a dream, the death of a loved one, the loss of something that mattered, with God, is not the end of the story. I have always liked Jesus’ references to agriculture in the gospels, but it honestly was not until I started putting my hands in the dirt that I began to understand those better. I began to see God’s heart in a different way too. It was totally intentional on His part that Jesus’ body was placed in a garden tomb, because when He rose, He wanted His people to know that He has a way of turning the end of a story into the beginning of the next, a grave into a garden.
My garden has been born out of many graves. And while I wish that things were different, I can also see the dream that God has for Well Watered Gardens. One day, it will reach the fullness of my vision for it, and what a beauty to behold it will be. Until then, I am going to keep putting my hands in the dirt and remembering that God can and will grow beauty out of my losses, no matter how deep or painful. And, if you need to be reminded of that, feel free to come join me in the garden.
