My daughter recently reminded me that when my wife and I arrived at the hospital shortly after Theo’s birth, my first comment was to express my joy that I would now have someone to help me with my gardening. Today, three years later, we took a step forward in fulfilling that dream. When Theo first came outside, he played with a toy truck that he drives around the paths in our backyard, but during one of his trips he stopped and watched while I removed three bee balm plants from their pots and placed them in holes I had dug for them in a perennial flower bed. He then joined me and together we sprinkled a fresh compost mixture around the base of each plant. Once that task was finished, he started walking around the flower bed, periodically scooping up a handful of dirt, and sprinkling the bits of soil on the tops of various flowers and ornamental grasses.
He then collected the three empty plastic pots, filled one with dirt, and tried to see how high he could mound the dirt in the pot. Somewhat frustrated by the unwillingness of the dirt to remain in place, he took a second pot, turned it upside down, and used that as a lid to keep the dirt from falling out of the first pot. Meanwhile, I was pulling up weeds (most notably clumps of creeping charlie), collecting this debris in a bucket, and dumping the contents on a compost pile in the back of the yard. Retrieving his metal dump truck, Theo picked up some of my freshly harvested weeds, placed them in the bed of his truck, and wheeled several loads to the compost bin. I thanked him for his assistance.
After parking his dump truck, he found a large, white, round plastic lid lying next to the garage. He carried the lid over to an old dolly I use for moving cement blocks and other heavy items. Holding the lid up to the dolly, he transformed it into a steering wheel, and for several minutes he pretended he was driving a Richard Scary dolly car. His use of the dolly reminded me of two hedge trees on the farm where I lived when I was his age. Many of the trees’ roots were above ground and interlocked in an intricate embrace, creating what I imagined as the bow of a boat. On this limestone hill in southern Kansas, these trees and their roots enabled me to become the captain of a sailboat sailing the seven seas. All my grandson needed was a plastic lid and a rusty dolly.
As I was preparing to transplant a flowering Rozanne cranesbill, came to me with a yellow dandelion bloom he had just picked. When I commented on this “yellow flower,” he informed me it was a “dan - de-lion,” carefully enunciating each syllable. I confirmed his identification, “Yes, a dandelion.”
When we started gardening, the sky was overcast, but the sun soon began to break through the clouds, inspiring a grandmother to bring out her sunhat for Theo, a hat with a broad brim and a large attached cloth to protect the back of the neck. Our grandson has light, easy-to-burn skin–evidence of his German/British ancestry. After a few minutes, he removed the hat, and despite my patient insistence, he was determined he would not wear this hat. So I put grandma’s nice, clean hat on my head, and I gave him my old, sweat-drenched fisherman’s hat. Although it was far too big for his noggin, he pushed it back on his head and decided it was stylistically perfect. For the next half hour, we wore each other’s hats, but then, without warning or explanation, he came to me, retrieved his grandmother’s hat, gave me back my hat, and returned to his dirt pile.
For a long time he sat on the edge of a flower bed and moved dirt from one pile to another. His earth-moving efforts were accompanied by a personal sound track, a mixture of singing and talking to himself, without need for any Apple or Samsung appliance. Occasionally the singing would turn into loud noise effects and screeching, evidence of his joy in making such diverse sounds. As for the talking, most of the words were unintelligible, and I had no idea if he was using real words or was experimenting with an imaginary language. I’m reminded of a young lady who occasionally helps with weeding in our backyard flower beds. She often has earbuds, listening to recorded music, enabling her to be two places at one time, the body in our backyard, the mind who knows where. Theo knows how to live in the present, using whatever is available, requiring no special tools. Today, all he needed was a few plastic pots and a pile of dirt.
I remind myself that gardening is fundamentally present-oriented, process-oriented. There will never be a final product. The garden is always becoming something else, only small portions over which I can control. Theo naturally lives by this present-in-the-process world, playing an infinite game with no final score. This afternoon he had no interest in producing a final result: he was content to play in the dirt, absorbed in the tactile pleasures of soil running through your fingers.
While we were gardening together, we rarely needed any overt communication with each other. I let him do his thing, he let me do my thing. A few times we sought assistance or accommodation. But most of the time we functioned independently. And that was okay. When I’m in a garden, I relish the solitude. I don’t feel a need to talk with anyone other than myself. Today, however, was a bit different. We were operating independently but I appreciated the pleasure of gardening with someone I love, hoping to learn some things about how he sees the world. And perhaps he will learn something from me. While my grandson will not retain any conscious memory of what we did this afternoon, perhaps a message about the pleasures and serenity of working in a garden will be nurtured. I regret that I have no memory of working in the garden with my father, but I know that in my childhood we would have spent hundreds of hours together in that space, hours that changed my life forever. Perhaps it’s like learning a language: I have no recollection of how and when I learned any of the words I used to write this essay, but I was immersed in this language from birth, and it was absorbed and became fundamental to my being a human being. Perhaps learning how to garden has a similar rhythm.