“The shape of time and space is different in wilderness. Time is something encountered through the sense not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know in a wild place is largely translated through the body.” – Terry Tempest William, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
I’ve noticed that gardening cues me into time in ways I didn’t experience before becoming so intimately acquainted with the seasons. In a garden, every wave of time is felt; you experience it with every new bloom, every slow unfurling of a leaf, or the fruiting of a plant. These incremental changes add up, and I can’t help but feel as if I am always trying to catch my breath as the garden continuously surprises me with new growth. If only I could stop time for a moment, to take in the bumble bee that has slipped into the lupine petals, or pause when the light catches the petals of a poppy so perfectly. However, there is no undoing this relentless reeling of time, and so I stumble along in the garden in awe at the growth that escapes me daily.
When gardening, you feel time slip through your hands. I feel each reverberation of the clock as I weave tomato stems through their trellis wires. Where did that cold March morning go when I was seeding these very plants? Peas climb their trellis wire, and I stake the dahlias that have suddenly emerged overnight. The tulips have disappeared in a riot of yarrow blooms that are destined to fade as well, forming bunches of brown stalks that I leave up in the garden all through the quiet winter months.
I can’t say if it’s the task of gardening that has left me with this bewildered sense of time escaping, or if it’s just getting older. That old adage that time moves quicker with every day feels truer and truer every year. I remember thinking when I was younger that three years felt like a lifetime to wait for fruit on an apple tree. Now I am astonished by the speed of it. I don’t mind if I have to wait two years for a biennial to bloom; two years come in the blink of an eye.
Being this tuned into the seasons, learning to enjoy the nuanced differences brought on by every day leaves you feeling like not a second of it is wasted. Each moment in a garden is made precious, even winter brings the robin’s song. There is new joy and discovery as we watch our gardens age, and we age alongside them, the calendar steadily moving on. In a blink of an eye the sunflower has grown taller than me and the zucchini plants have doubled in size. Roses reach out their thorny arms into pathways that pull at my sweater, but I can recall planting those tiny bare root sprigs only three years ago. All the while my own clock spins alongside the garden, I get older too, and maybe like the garden I become wiser as well. None of us can escape the relentless tick of time, so I choose to surrender to the present, to the joys of the here and now.
– With Love from the Garden
Shannon
Farm to Table
Our tasting room menu this month features French sorrel, salad greens, and herbs.