Building a Garden

This is my backyard. 

But it hasn't always looked like this. When my landlords bought the building five years ago, they inherited a sprawling concrete space. The transformation wasn't a simple one. Sometimes, an aspiring gardener's got to wield some serious tools before even thinking about planting seeds. 

Lush havens don't just sprout up--they're cultivated. Better Homes and Gardens has this nifty tool you can use to plot out your garden online. Then the manual labor begins: hauling away debris that's risen to the top of the soil (we're still unearthing metal from decades ago), taking the soil pH to see if it's safe to grow edibles...Gardening's definitely more intensive than prancing around with pruners. 

One of my friends, a transplant from the car-bound West coast, loves to stroll the city blocks and gawk at buildings. Unlike me, he doesn’t just see glass, steel, and the looming threat of a dingy cubicle.  He likes to point out that, unlike in rural areas, every area in a city is a built environment. He sees the stories behind the many-storied buildings: the various circumstances that led architects, builders, employers, and employees to construct and inhabit every inch of the city. To him, stately Brooklyn brownstones, tedious office towers, and glamorous Upper East Side penthouses are fascinating artifacts from the lives of the people who sought, bought, and sold them. I totally follow this reasoning; I just don’t think that it only applies to the city.

On a recent trip to Chicago, I browsed the gardening section at the cavernous Myopic Books and picked up Dominique Browning’s memoir about suburban gardening. It really resonated with me. She writes, “Gardens are decidedly not just about the plants in them, or the way the plants are organized…The suburban garden begins with nothing. Its contours are shaped by people—not just the gardener, but those who wander through, just visiting or lending a hand.”

Cultivating a garden is like designing a building: you research the materials that are best suited for the project, come up with a plan, get your hands dirty, and watch the work progress. I think that, like a building tells a story about its residents, a garden describes its gardener. Frothy flowers and hearty stalks are testaments to the hands that coaxed them out of the soil and into the sunlight.