What I Can’t Live Without

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
March 30th, 2009
Filed in Annuals and Perennials
Tags: garden, garden planning

I’ll turn 30 on April 24th. I’ve been gardening since I was three years old. I remember picking green beans with my parents at their first house. I remember calling Asiatic lilies “bubblegum flowers” because I thought they smelled like gum. I remember dumping sand from my sandbox in my mom’s flower bed, telling her it “improved drainage.”

I had my very own garden when I was six. I would cut zinnias to keep by my bedside. I can still smell the putrid stink of the water in the vase after letting the flowers sit too long because I didn’t want to throw them out. I made my dad help me dig up my asparagus fern to bring inside during the winter. My imaginary friends were the lilac shrubs, forsythia bushes and figs dividing our yard from our neighbor’s yard.

While in graduate school, the man I thought I would marry broke up with me over the phone. I made him drive up to do it in person. While he slept on the futon, I planted my first container of lettuce seeds, in March, in the Snow, in Delaware. I watered them with tears from my hysterical sobbing. Eventually he woke up. I served my new boyfriend, with the same name, ironically, lettuce from that pot. My roommate thinks I might have also served him aphids.

I re-taught myself to grow plants from seed, tending the most beautiful flower and vegetable gardens I have ever been privileged to grow at Fort Ticonderoga, my first real job out of school. I grew tons of lettuce and beets, and served my patient husband creations from strange vegetables. “Lettuce soup” is the catchall phrase for all of my cooking failures.

Today, I’m a garden writer. As a freelancer, my work never really ends. Last weekend it was gorgeous, and I played hooky from the computer and dug up another flower bed. I might have jumped the gun, planting some sunflower and zinnia seeds, and waking up this morning to 42 degree temperatures. While searching for a picture for Chris to used to debut our new ebook, I unearthed a lot of photos I had put away. I figured out something this morning when looking through them.

I Can’t Live Without my Own Garden

Everybody has something completely unrelated to family or friends that he or she can’t live without. Outside of my health and my husband and family, I can’t live without a garden. My garden. My huge garden. A garden that I can get lost in, lose plants in, lose my yard to. The only thing that makes me really, truly happy (aside from spending time with my family) is gardening. Every day when I get home from work, I run out to check my seeds. I could sit for hours on the couch with my dog, looking out the window at my flowers.

How did it take me so long to figure this out? I have no idea. Probably because I spent my whole live preparing to be a garden manager, a garden director. I did that for a while, and was very happy with my work. I ended up having to take another path, though, and became a writer instead. Sometimes you don’t really know how much you miss something until you don’t have it. I’m not going to take my garden for granted any more. If I can’t manage a public garden for the benefit of visitors right now, I’ll turn my own garden into the garden of my dreams. I think I have a good start. I spent all of my grocery money at the Master Gardener Plant Sale last week buying entirely frivolous plants. I ordered some more books from our organic gardening bookstore. I think I’m going to become a worm farmer. I feel like I’m back in my own skin.

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” Elizabeth Lawrence