Normally I’m a dependable person who does what I say I will do. Until springtime. It’s when all I want to do is live by the weather.
Meaning that on sunny days in April, I develop an intense desire to rake and dig and plant in my backyard regardless of anything else I’m supposed to do. It’s when my plants, like the tips of peonies—which English gardener Gertrude Jekyll called adorable pink snouts—begin to poke through the dark earth. It’s the time of the miracle of rebirth in New England.
Once early in my marriage, I agreed to go with my husband to London in May. When we returned to Connecticut, a flower bed that did not get enough rainwater had become a miniature version of another bed that got water draining off the driveway. Luckily the parched bed was not entirely brown, and I saved most of the plants. Since then it has amazed me when friends who call themselves gardeners take trips in the spring.
My reluctance to make plans or go to meetings this time of year is a not-so-secret addiction that I try, usually unsuccessfully, to hide because it seems so, well, unfriendly and irresponsible. Sometimes, I want it to rain—not just because rain makes the garden grow—but because rainy days make me a more reliable person who doesn’t mind being inside.
It’s not just that I let others down in the spring, I also abandon my writing. This happens even though I know that writing and gardening balance each other as one exercises the brain and the other the body. But even this synchronicity doesn’t matter to me if it’s a day when the light sparkles and a breeze gently touches my face.
One spring when I was on deadline to finish writing a book, “I struggled to keep my mind on the manuscript because if I ventured outside even for a few minutes, the effortless work of the garden would absorb me in a heartbeat, and it might well be the end of a morning of writing,” I wrote in my garden memoir, Four Tenths of an Acre: Reflections on a Gardening Life. “I asked myself how to weigh the easy pleasure of gardening against the more elusive satisfaction of writing. And how to compare the private playfulness of growing flowers with the public experience of being published. At moments, I questioned whether I should be writing at all.”
I’m not the only one who struggles with the compulsion to garden in the growing season. In New Mexico Georgia O’Keeffe, a farmer’s daughter, had to deliberately leave her house with the irrigated garden and go to the one in a semi-arid area to get any painting done. Vita Sackville West famously stated that gardeners have to be ruthless, and I wonder if she also meant about being inside her writing tower as well as digging up disappointing plants.
It’s not easy to live by the weather in New England. It’s almost impossible to predict and can change from minute to minute. When clouds move across the sky on windy days, creating shadows one moment and sunshine the next, the rapidly changing light makes it difficult for me to decide whether to be inside or outside. During the eclipse this week, all impulses were suspended as the weird dim light made me do nothing at all
So, this time of year I try to be a little elusive if not completely invisible. I want people to forget I exist, just for a little while, so I can devote myself to nurturing the green growth in my garden. By the time of the summer solstice at the end of June, however, as the days start to get shorter again, it will be the beginning of the end of my urgency to garden all the time.
You're right: you are a dependable person, but it's lovely to read that you think of yourself as "irresponsible" come spring. I'm not sure you merit such a strong word. But I feel the call of
spring in your essay, which is lovely!
Yes, Sally. Sometimes the garden and the page are both responsibilities and callings at the same time.