Confessions of a Green Thumb
- karenlykkebo
- Jun 21
- 8 min read
This is a love letter to gardening. There's not much of a point to this post other than me rambling a bit about the wonders of gardens and gardening.
As I started writing this, I realized there's A LOT I want to/can share about my love for gardens, so this will become a series of blog-posts, lol.
First up is just some philosophical and nostalgic mumble-jumbles about gardening.
So bear with me. I'm a bit obsessed...
Posts to look forward to:
The Becoming of a Garden Witch (how I became obsessed with making my own herbal tea)
The Making of Organized Chaos (a bit more details of the stages of chaos my garden has gone through)
The Saga of the Endless Digging (I dig a lot and I know there's a whole garden-religion centered around "No Dig" but I love digging...)
When the Flowers said "Hold My Beer..." (about how unreal flowers are)
I really, really love gardens. To be in them, to fix them up, to think about them. I love walking with bare feet on cool grass and to get my fingers stained with dirt. I love to dig and pull up weeds. I love the manual labor of doing something.
I've always loved it, and in recent years, I've been able to really pursue this as my partner and I moved into a ground-floor apartment with a small garden, and this year was allowed to use half of our neighbor's community lot.
More on the process of our gardening in a later post...
First up: why is it so wonderful to be in a garden?
There are several reasons this love is so deeply manifested for me.
Magical nostalgia
I vividly remember the summer vacations spent with my grandma and grandpa. They had a massive garden (or at least I remember it as huge!). There was a "pretty" section with vibrant flowerbeds, a "wilder" section full of wildflowers and big perennials, a veggie patch always brimming with potato, peas, beets, and zucchini, a green house with small, crisp cucumbers and bright, red tomatoes, and of course a shaded, spooky nook behind the shed and bush where it was always moist and the compost smelled.(This garden and these summers are the main inspiration behind the short story Dirt You Shall Become - read more about it here)
I'd always help pull out weeds or mow the lawn. We'd pick cucumbers straight from the vine and snack on them throughout the day. Things we couldn't eat at the moment got pickled and preserved. It was so bounty-full! We'd sit under the shade of the larch tree, grandad would pull an extension cord from the house (probably 10-20 meter at least) and grandma would bake waffles that we smothered with freshly-made strawberry jam. What absolute heaven!
Grandma was a bit of a pagan believer herself (of the record of course) and told me that the flowers of the Fox Glove were actually fairy dresses and in the drops caught in the mid
dle of the Lupin's leaves they'd bathe at night.
So I think one big reason I love to work in my garden, is that it brings a sense of nostalgia and magic to me. I look at my Fox Glove and can't help imagining a young fairy pulling up her frail-pink skirt. I marvel at my peony (that I dug up from my partner's grandma's garden - with permission of course) and am reminded of the massive peony in the garden of my childhood home. I sit on my porch with a cup of coffee and reminiscent in the years passed.
Biodiversity and biology
Not many know this (I think), but I have a bachelors degree in biology and though I later went on to focus on the marine ecosystem, it started out with a love for the wild. The first year, we had field courses in biodiversity, learned to ID flowers, plants, and bug, and spent most of the summer geeking out about it.
With that in mind, and with just a general love for biodiversity, healthy ecosystems, and thriving nature, I'm doing my best to make my garden a cultivated wilderness. An organized chaos, so to speak.
One thing I'm oddly proud of, is knowing that if/when society collapses, my little 4x6 m garden will grow into a flower meadow full of bugs, bees, and birds. When we moved in it was a lawn with a thuja in the corner, two small rhododendrons, a schersmin, and a tiny, oddly-shaped plum. Now, there's almost more flowerbed than lawn.
I've got flowers blooming from February (the first crocus and snow drops) to October (the last orpines, aster, and gaura). Birds are frequently visiting our bird bath, from little grey sparrows, to wood peckers, the Eurasian jay, magpies, doves, blue tits, blackbirds, etc. We have a bumble bee nest underneath our deck and a big fat toad in the shady shrubbery. There's a myriad of different bees and beetles, dragon flies and butterflies, and in winter even mice in the shed.
In a world where pollinators are struggling and threatened to extinction, and more and more wilderness and wildlife is lost to industry, pollution, and agriculture, I think it's punk as fuck to allow the wild into my home.
(The one thing I do try to keep out - I put up a fence now - are those damn deer! Mostly because we're having a mutual interest in tulips and kale and where I see it as my tulips to behold in wonder and my kale to eat in salads - the deer are under the belief that we share and it's their personal buffet. For more about this disagreement, I'll point you to the short story My Heart is a Tulip that's dedicated to the hungry deer that tried to take over my garden.)
From seed to plate
To hold a tiny seed the size of pinhead, carefully place it in dirt, then spend days - sometimes weeks - agonizing over the blank surface of the ground. Then that moment, that joyful spur of excitement, when the first tiniest green sprout fights its way up from the depression of the dirt.
"Fuck yeah they're growing!" happy dance
The sprout grows bigger and soon you have an actual plant with stems and leaves - the whole shebang! Finally, it's time to move it to a pot, or maybe even transplant it straight out to the veggie patch.
Then comes the tending. The careful pruning, watering, and whispers of
encouragement. You hope the weather is kind to it and try your best to keep pests away, pull up weeds around it.
And your plant grows... and grows.
Suddenly, it's no longer a tiny baby, but a fully fleshed young adult showing of vibrant flowers and attracting all the bees to the yard. Damn right, mine's better than yours. Oh, what a proud plant-mamma moment!
Months pass, the flowers have withered, fruit is developing. First green and small, but under the sun's energizing rays, they grow, colors change. Before you know it, what started as a tiny pinhead seed, are bowls full of vibrant, juicy tomatoes.
What the fresh hell magic is this?!
How unbelievably cool is to follow the whole process from tiny seed to full vegetable.
How incredible is it, that this is even possible? I can't wrap my mind around the evolution of this. It's so fucking amazing that this is how plants work.
Something so easily overlooked, a tiny seed that could just blow away in the wind, can become a plant that gives off a loads and loads of tasty veggies.
We don't think about it when we just walk to the grocery store to pick the best looking zucchini or head of salad. We tend to forget that that what we eat comes from the very earth we live on. Following the growing process gives a sense of purpose and of humiliation.
Nature is incredible!
The harrowing joy of slow-motion
But I've realized that one of the things I love the very most about gardening, is that it forces me to slow the fuck down.
It's mindfulness in its perfect imperfection.
I can plant the seed but I can't decide when it'll sprout. Or if it even will sprout. I can watch it grow, water it, tend it, whisper encouragement as I prune leaves, but in the end, I've got no control over the growth of the plant. I can't decide when or if it'll set fruit, nor if they'll ripen. I can hope and do the best I can for the plant to thrive.
I can meander through the garden, watch everything push out of the dirt, and hope there'll be masses of beautiful flowers later on, then maybe butterflies and bees. But it all comes down to the weather patterns, to nutrition in the dirt, to the co-op of the surrounding plants.
I can weed out my entire flowerbed and veggie patch, and after a days/week I can return and start over because the world is a living, breathing thing. Seeds get spread with the wind and with birds and bugs that thrive among the plants.
It's a never-ending cycle and I love being part of it.
I love the anticipation, watching - quite literally - the fruit of my labor and letting go of the control we so often seek in our daily life.
No matter what I do, my tomato will be a tomato, my zucchini will only grow zucchinis, my peony will always be pink. And I can simply try to give the plant the best possible conditions to be the prettiest it has ever been.
To quote the wise Grand Master Oogway when he teaches Master Shifu to let go of the illusion of control:
"I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] no matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach."
(Yes, this is from Kung Fu Panda and it has some wonderful messages about peace, belief, and mindfulness)
So that's what I do. I let go of the illusion of control in my organized chaos of a garden. I pick out beautiful flowers - often buying them on clearance, rescuing them from our home associations community compost, or even getting discarded plants from family members - and wait with the excitement of a child before Christmas Eve to see them bloom.
I go through the flowerbeds daily, picking out pests by hand (for instance those damned red beetles that love to munch on lily's) and clear off when one flower withers to make light and space for the one coming after it.
It's a never-ending project and the end-game is a little haven of flowers and an oasis of bio-diversity.
It's a hobby that - though time consuming - let's me relax, unwind, and forget time even exists. It lets me forget society, obligations, worries and simply marvel at the wonder that is nature and life.
So cheers to that! 🌸
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