From the Ground Up: In the Garden of Microcosm Gods

This morning I went out into my garden, as I do often, and just strolled around, making a mental task list of everything that needs to be done. A few weeks ago I began a full overhaul of the garden; moving, expanding, yanking out, adding in… with the hopes of it being set in time for planting. While the (hopefully) last of the frosts past this past week, we still have much to do but it is closer to being done than a week ago.
The morning air was cool, compared to the heat that has enveloped the world, a heat far too extreme for the end of May in the northeast US.  Birds sang as I plugged sweet potato sprigs into their spots near the pallet trellises we mounted to the side of our garage. The breeze tickled, the earth beneath my bare feet and knees was moist and refreshing. Truly an ideal morning to be out.
First posted in my gardening blog in May 2013-

Gardening is always a thoughtful time for me. When I’m not thinking about where to put the plants or how to maximize space on our .15 of an acre, my mind wanders and trips over this or that.

The strawberry pallet wall I mounted to the side of the garage last year.



Today I wondered why people enjoy gardening so much. The answer, at its base, seems simple. We commune with nature. We play in the dirt. We create. But we can, and many people do, accomplish that in multitudes of different ways.

planting the seeds for future deliciousness

There is something to be said for nurturing a plant from seed to table, but then, many people don’t undertake this for any number of reasons or excuses, preferring to buy the plants in a degradable pot. Just plug, water and Voila! Plants we can say we grew, but really didn’t. We just encouraged what was already started.
So then, why? Pride? Ego? That’s when it dawned on me…we have a god-complex. Mankind, at its core, loves to destroy. We love to level things and bring something from nothing. We thrive on “rescuing”, but many of us don’t want to admit it and gardens are the perfect place to do this guilt-free.

On our hands and knees in the freshness of a morning or the blaze of the day we decide who lives and who dies as we yank creeping charlies or cleavers out of their comfy homes by the roots, even as we gently tickle the roots of the pretty plants and lovingly set them in the nests we dug with our hands. We layer wood chips and discard to choke to death anything we might not want poking its “ugly” head up so it doesn’t mar the beauty we are trying to create. We cut swaths of grass, hacking the roots with knives and rolling it up to discard, making way for beds to tuck our preferred choices into. Pesticides, either naturally created or chemically manufactured, keep our woodland neighbors at bay while we purchase ladybugs and worms (think about that! We purchase live bugs!) and introduce them to the microcosm we have created. As gardeners we become little gods of the worlds we create so that we can stand back with pride and say, “I did that.”

In a world full of such chaos well beyond our control, this socially-acceptable world-building escape is therapeutic. At times it is frustrating as much as it is calming, but at the end of the day a deep satisfaction curls into our bones when we smell that flower or feel the warm juice of the off the tree fruit run down our chins.
It’s moments like that where I fully acknowledge, it’s good to be a (micro) god.