Over the weekend, I was reading "Digging In: Tending to Life in Your Own Back Yard," a gentle gardening memoir by Robert Benson (WaterBrook Press, 2007) and he had a thought that I've been considering ever since: that gardening is a lot about waiting. We may think it's about vibrant colors and dramatic design but really, Benson's right. It's more about waiting.
We wait for spring, we wait for rain, we wait for the temperatures to rise so we can wait for stuff to come up. We wait for the trees to leaf out. We wait for the hostas to poke up. We wait for buds to turn to blooms and blooms to turn to seed heads. So much waiting.
I guess gardening isn't for the impatient, but even patient types get antsy this time of year. Visiting a Home Depot over the weekend I noticed lines in the garden center stretching all the way to the back of the building. Yes, it's warm out there, but it's still a little early to be planting in earnest.
You'd never know it from the length of that line. I went looking for a certain kind of rose the other night at a specialty garden center and there wasn't one to be had. "It's a little early," I was told. But lots of folks at Home Depot had roses in their carts.
"You cannot hurry it along," Benson writes of the season we're in right now. "Spring comes when it comes; roses bloom when they will; the garden grows at its own sweet pace. What it teaches you is to wait, to be patient, and to pay attention."
Paying attention we do in spades. I'm out there every morning and evening checking progress in millimeters. I'm waiting, all right. And struggling to be patient.
