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.

Arborvitae on a Stick

Our little local garden club toured a very local garden last evening. We couldn't figure out the story of the arborvitae, which looked like pointy popsicles on a stick. Sort of fun-looking, actually.

Then the garden owner told us the secret: The deer eat the bottom branches.

Maybe we are like the arborvitae. During our young years, the world eats up our time and energy. Eventually, we can replace busy-ness with the activities and people who are important to us. Then we can fill out with wisdom and grow into our authentic selves.

Our legs may look a bit spindly as time goes on, but our hearts are fuller than ever.