A Person Who Grows

The tiny triumph of sowing seeds

My garden is a place of retreat: It’s where I go to be alone with my thoughts and add some beauty to the world. But it’s also one piece of a shared community garden, where neighbors from around the world grow all sorts of different plant species. We all garden on our own schedules, but when we overlap, we always take some time to commiserate over pests or share the harvest. It’s nice.

The longer I garden, the more aware I become of what unusual creatures gardeners are. Our fingernails are rimmed with dirt and we wear preposterously large sunhats. We cheer at the sight of a seedling’s first true leaves and storm through all five stages of grief when pests plague our plots. Everything becomes filtered through the lens of the garden. Before I started gardening, I hated rain. Now, I look through the watery window pane and think, A nice rain for my seeds!

In short: We’re kind of nuts.

One of the best books I’ve read on the gardener’s neuroses is Karel Čapek’s The Gardener’s Year. Originally published in 1929, the book was rereleased in 2002 as part of the Modern Library Gardening series edited by Michael Pollan. It’s a brief and delightful read, punctuated with charming illustrations by Čapek’s brother, Josef. Reading it, I saw myself as part of a long lineage of people who obsess over the weather and buy more plants than they have room for.

Josef Čapek’s illustration of a gardener trying a bit too hard to keep his spirits up in winter.

There’s a lot of humor in the book, but it also gets at the salubrious benefits of the craft. (The Well-Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith is an excellent deep-dive on this topic.) Gardening, Čapek tells us, pulls us out of rumination and forces us to invest in the future. Seed-sowing is a great example of this. Many of us sow our first seeds in the depths of winter, and their tiny green shoots offer a powerful dopamine hit in a time of little light.

Even in winter, the garden is alive and active. Bulbs and rootstock are working hard to bring forth a new spring. The seeds we sow set the annual growing cycle in motion. Čapek writes,

“We don’t see [seeds] because they are under the earth; we don’t know the future because it is within us. … If we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man — that is, a man who grows.”

I thought of this quote today as I sowed the first seeds — kale, sorrel, and leek — of my garden year.

Sowing leeks, kale, and sorrel in my tiny kitchen

Who knows what the future has in store for me, but seed sowing is a reminder that it’s already on its way. The darkness of winter will pass, as it always does.