Curating Your Garden

 

A new word has entered my gardening vocabulary: Curated. I have a curated garden. Expensive gardeners are now called curators of the gardens they attend to. The word "curate" means to select, organize, and look after the items in a collection. Curate also implies that my plants are swish; they are cool; they are "in." 

My plants don't know or care whether they are "in" or not. They are simply happy to grow, unless conditions are not right.

It's true that i aim for an aesthetically pleasing garden--blues and yellows together, silvers and pinks. At the same time, i realize the impermanence of my entire undertaking. Twenty years from now, very little of "my" garden will remain. My collections will scatter and be overgrown and replaced by something or someone else.

Every curated collection is impermanent.

And so are we.

Pomelo

I first met a pomelo in Thailand a few years ago. It looks like a really big grapefruit, but the fruit is sweet and not at all sour or bitter. The pomelo skin is quite thick. In Thailand, they are sold already peeled and sectioned.

Pomelos are now available at my local food coop for $1.99 a pound, and each pomelo weighs almost 2 pounds. They are expensive, but they are worth it.

I actually aspire to be like a pomelo. Maybe i could take it as my totem fruit? Thick-skinned, in the sense of not taking criticism or insult personally, yet sweet and mild at heart.