My Favorite Workout

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”  Marcus Tullius Cicero


No, I haven’t embarked on a new fitness plan, unless you consider it “fitness for the soul”.   I have a friend who runs marathons and I admire her very much. (No, really, I do – if running’s your thing, have at it!)  However, while I do enjoy walking and hiking, a recent statement I noticed on Facebook fits me more:  “If you see me running, call the police.”    

 My favorite workout is a true workout, nonetheless.  In fact, it actually burns calories!  Every year, when spring arrives, I suddenly have the urge to lug around fifty-pound bags of topsoil and mulch, numerous pots of plants, and move mounds of soil around with my little shovel.  I get really grubby while doing it. I’m not one of those picture-perfect gardening women you see in the gardening magazines wearing a straw hat and a summer dress with perfectly clean gardening gloves and a pair of little snips in her hand.  I crawl around in the dirt on my hands and knees.  I’ll end the day filthy, sweaty, and exhausted, but extremely gratified.  I’ve been bitten by fire ants, stabbed by thorns, cut with rusty tools, and once nearly knocked myself out on a concrete walk when I flipped over backwards after finally winning a tug-of-war with a particularly stubborn daylily I was dividing.  I leave little trails of gardening debris around the house when I walk inside.  My husband looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind and wonders why I put myself through all that.

 I don’t have a large garden, because I don’t have time or energy right now.  If I ever stop working full time, everyone will know because my garden will probably expand by leaps and bounds.  And maybe someday I’ll have the garden of my dreams, but I certainly don’t have it right now.  I’m jealous of the people with beautifully landscaped and manicured yards.  My yard is rocky and has terrible soil, so I’ve learned through trial and error to make raised garden beds.  I have a few of these raised beds around the yard, and the last few years I’m also doing more container gardening, since it is much less labor-intensive.  I grow mostly flowers and herbs – annuals and perennials -  with a few vegetables now and then.  When I was a child, my parents and grandparents always had large vegetable gardens.  My mother never really liked gardening, but my dad did (his favorite plant was hydrangea, which he called “high geranium”), and both my grandmothers were talented gardeners.  My grandmother Anna loved irises, and my grandmother Zell favored roses.  I grow both.  My roses are from cuttings I obtained from the side of a rural road a couple of years ago – an old fashioned pink “Seven Sisters” rose, a climbing rose that I’ve grown in pots the last couple of years until the cuttings rooted well, then planted in beds last fall.  I’m also growing geraniums and hydrangeas from cuttings – it’s actually a very easy process now that I finally had the courage to try it and quit procrastinating about it.  It’s a wonderful way to multiply plants without purchasing more, if you have the patience.

 My gardening has also led to related activities such as feeding birds, adding bird houses and hummingbird feeders to my yard, and learning the difference between beneficial insects and destructive or harmful insects.  I don’t use pesticides, and I now have a healthy population of ladybugs (actually beetles) around my plants, and last year there were several of the large black and yellow garden spiders that built magnificent webs and stayed until late autumn, when they completed their life cycles after constructing their egg sacs.  I haven’t seen any of their offspring’s webs yet, but I suspect they are still too small and I’ll see them soon.  I’ll look forward to that day.  I'm probably the only person I know who isn't terrified by the sight of a praying mantis.  In fact, I love seeing them, because that means my garden is a wonderful habitat. 

 As I’ve grown older and more experienced after some 25 years of gardening, I also sometimes force myself to refrain from giving unsolicited advice to would-be gardeners.  Not that I’m anywhere near an expert, but some things just drive me nuts.  I read a story one time by one of my favorite gardening writers, Cassandra Danz (aka “Mrs. Greenthumbs”) who, sadly, died from cancer while she was still in her 50’s.  I highly recommend her books as she gives practical gardening advice tinged with a healthy dose of humor.  In one anecdote, she described a friend of hers who was something of a “gardening bandit” -  if someone was doing something terrible to a plant, like pruning a flowering shrub such as forsythia into a hedge-like ball or square, this woman would leave anonymous notes in the offender’s mailbox at night:  “Please don’t prune your forsythia into those horrible balls!  They’re meant to be free-flowing, and you’re cutting off next year’s blooms!”, and “Please don’t plant your hostas in the blazing sun – you’re murdering them!”.  I’ve had to fight the urge lately to leave a similar note at a certain house that states: “If you can’t or won’t grow real flowers, please don’t stick artificial ones all over your yard to make people think you do.” 

 For the most part, gardeners I’ve met are usually practical, common-sense people.  Gardeners understand patience, and we also seem to have an understanding of the basic cycle of life that some people don’t have, and most of us understand our place in that cycle.  Most gardeners also understand the fragility of the planet and eco-systems, and try to do our part to help protect the environment during our time here. Gardening doesn’t even need to be done on a large scale -  if you don’t have outside space,  some pots of herbs on a bright windowsill or a few houseplants to care for can be a very gratifying experience.  The main thing is to get your hands dirty. 

Gardening grounds and calms me in a way that nothing else can do (not even reading!). There is something about the smell of earth and the sight of flowers, and green things like moss and trees, that is very soothing to my spirit. After a stressful day, sometimes doing something as simple as repotting a plant at the potting bench that my late stepfather built for me is all I need to once again be at peace. Places to sit in your garden are also important - I love taking a book outdoors to one of my benches where I can sit and read, looking up now and then to gaze at the flowers or trees.  Scents are also important in the gardening experience; there is nothing like the scent of a rose, or the fragrance of honeysuckle from the edge of a nearby woodland to suddenly transport you back to a moment, a person, or an event in your life.  This morning, as I stepped outside my door, I was greeted with the honey-like scent of Sweet Alyssum, blooming in pots in the wire baker's rack at the entry of my home.  It's a cool-weather plant, and I planted it last fall with pansies, not expecting it to survive the winter.  To my delight it did survive, and now I inhale the lovely fragrance anytime I leave or enter the house.  Moments like that are the reason I still love gardening after all these years.  It is not a hobby to be tossed aside when it becomes boring, because gardening inserts itself into your very soul.  No matter how bad I feel, or how hectic or stressful my life becomes, the plants are always waiting. 

                  A house wren built a tiny nest and raised a brood in one of my containers last year - needless to say, it was interesting keeping the plant watered until the babies flew!