Rolling out of bed, I grab my Apple watch and check my phone. Confusion and delight spread across my face as I see that the sky is supposed to be blue today. All day. Like a normal spring day. There isn’t a cloud on the radar nor a bloop in the hourly. It’s confusing, all right, with our rain gauge saying we’ve accumulated over 8 inches just this May alone. Instead of “April showers bring May flowers” do we need to adjust it to “May showers bring June flowers?”
My poor daffodils literally drowned this year, and my first attempt at potted bulbs never had a chance to dry out, rotting in their pots that were half-filled with rocks. Maybe I was supposed to cover them with plywood or something to keep them from drowning as well?
Because I have to be honest, I am an uneducated gardener. A Google gardener, I sometimes like to call myself. When we first bought the property, I would sit out in the vegetable garden, weeding the beds with the “Vegetable Gardener’s Bible” by Edward C. Smith (from the Northeast Kingdom) open to whatever plant I was working on. I had no idea what I was doing … and it showed. As soon as we got the pH of the soil part, I failed miserably. My carrots were short, my peppers were puny, and the only things I was good at growing were asparagus, chives, and rhubarb.
But I loved the dirt under my fingernails, even through the gloves. I loved the weeding, cleaning out a safe space for my plants to grow, and making them happy. I loved designing the garden and creating the layout. I have an entire notebook of drawings, showing where the beds should go and how the plants should be arranged within them. The BF calls it my Book of Rectangles. But as I started redrawing the vegetable garden, it became increasingly obvious that what I really liked to do was landscape gardening.
The idea of creating long-lasting flower beds that all you had to do was weed them every year and move them around like you were decorating your property. This made sense to me. I never took landscape architecture classes, but I took design and structural architecture. This type of gardening made perfect sense to me. I started by tidying up the perennials that had been bequeathed to us when we purchased the house. When I had ACL surgery, I spent a summer sorting rocks in a bed that had been destroyed by Irene and created a springtime Zen garden with rock paths, a homemade bench, and a wooden owl chainsaw sculpture that the BF bought to promote wisdom. When a plant is unhappy, you dig it out and move it until it finds a happy place.
In my reading, I began to find excerpts about how gardening connected women to the Earth and how it is meditative in nature and strengthens our connection to the earth. Historically, women have found power through gardening, founding clubs, and schools that would give women their own domain in the home and increasingly outside of it. It was women gardeners who began the fight against billboards in the 1960s, who fought for the beauty of public lands and spaces—even if it was just the dead space at an intersection. It is the act of tending to plants, watching them grow, and nurturing the earth that makes us grow stronger as a people. It is healing and rejuvenating. It connects us to the Earth’s mother, strengthening her power and ours.
I love seeing the gardens of others and then rushing home to see how I can use that new knowledge to shape my own gardens. To care for and improve my own property. I took a 6-foot-diameter clump of hostas that were suffering in the hot sun and divided them up into a shaded border along my driveway. I got about 126 plants out of the separation, and nothing makes me smile more than when I drive into my home and am greeted by my entrance gardens, one in sun and one in shade, and then drive along my driveway. My welcoming committee. As I loved them, so they shine their love to me.
I brought happiness, both to myself and to nature. And that is such a beautiful thing. My hands in the dirt showed me why I love hiking so much and how truly connected to this land I have become. This land is an integral part of my identity, of who I am and who I will become. It’s one of my favorite parts of Vermont—our respect for the land and beautiful Green Mountains make us who we are. This is our land, and we must protect it and preserve it, for only together can we grow.
Merisa Sherman is a longtime Killington resident, global real estate advisor, town official, and Coach PomPom. She can be found online @femaleskibum or at [email protected].
