To Tend a Garden is to Refuse Amnesia

I plant things as a way of staying human. Not the flattened kind that moves through life by swiping and scrolling and swallowing whatever is packaged to be fast. I mean the human with dirt under the nails, skin burned in patterns by the sun, hands that know the texture of rot and the weight of ripeness.

Gardening, for me, is not a hobby. It’s resistance. It’s how I protest the world collapsing under the weight of its own artificial systems. I plant seeds in opposition to industrial food production, to big pharma, to the tightening grip of consumer logic. I plant because it’s the one place I can still hear truth spoken in a language older than any spoken language—through leaf, insect wing, the crack of roots threading their way through soil.

I don't grow food just to eat. I grow to remember. Each act—planting seeds, watching them split with the first green push—feels like recovering a fragment of something I've been made to forget. That I come from people who knew how to listen to the ground. That the land is not passive, and I am part of it.

To plant a garden is to remember we are not separate.

Not separate from the plants, the worms, the birdsong pitched in frequencies I’ll never fully hear. Not separate from the ache of my back, or the memory of ancestors whose palms folded around seeds the same way mine do. Not separate from the politics of food or the quiet joy of eating something homegrown. To plant anything is to root back into the world, to insist on staying in relationship with it.

I grow things because I need to. Because modern medicine doesn’t know my name. Because grocery store tomatoes taste like vacancy. Because I want to remember what it feels like to be in a body that is allowed to take part in the dance between sun and chlorophyll and breath.

I press my hands into warm soil and feel the pulse of something ancient—some wild, fungal intelligence that doesn’t need my words to understand me. My skin, exposed to light, begins to make its own medicine. I sweat. I stoop. I listen to the bees draw spirals around the flowering tops of clary sage. I watch ants carry soil like architects. I let the garden see me. Let the trees witness me. Let the wind memorize my scent.

Sometimes I pause just to taste. I rise from crouching in the rows and walk barefoot to the edge of the land, skirting the tree line in search of treasure. A wild raspberry, sun-warmed, collapses on my tongue—perfectly sweet, a temporal gift of summer. Early in the year, I sort through low tangles of grass and red thread to find a wild strawberry, no bigger than a fingernail, its flavor like a red whisper that delights my inner child and compels me to repeat the search.

The land offers these freely. And in receiving them, I feel seen—not just me, but us.

This is the reciprocity no textbook can teach. Not transaction, but relationship. We give our time, our body, our mistakes. The plants give nourishment, delight, spirit, and an ethereal presence of wisdom known and witnessed by generations of humans that came so long before us. People that we stand on the shoulders of, and yet we are forgetting the ways in which we make our home here on this planet. We are still these people, somewhere under the noise and distraction.

I plant too much. Always. This year, it’s chard—an unruly tide of it. I harvest armfuls. I share. I chop and brine. I learn how to eat it cooked, raw, fermented, baked into tarts, sautéed with eggs. It teaches me endurance. I don't love it every day, but I honor it. I see how long it took to become leaf. I think about the conversations it had with sun and soil, with rain and stars. I try to hold that in my body as I eat. I try not to waste it, though sometimes I do. But even then, something is fed—soil, worms, the next season’s hunger.

The garden doesn’t care about aesthetics. It cares about attention. It asks me to notice: color shifts, insect hieroglyphs on leaves, the slight lean of a plant toward morning light. I’ve learned more about pattern and palette from tall swaying stands of different varieties of heirloom corn than from any museum. I watch the way moisture and light catch in spiderwebs. The variations of red in an amaranth stalk, the dusty green-gray in lavender leaves. I take note. I try to live up to the intricacy.

When the harvest comes inside, the kitchen becomes another kind of studio. A space of transformation. I hang bundles of herbs, chop, cut, dehydrate, distill, infuse, pickle, ferment, and sauce. I crush petals between my fingers to see what they leave behind. I try to capture scent. I extract essence. There is alchemy here—not metaphorical, but real: transformation that requires time, fire, patience, and presence.

It's sticky and slow. It stains cutting boards; tiny flowers and seeds scatter across tabletops and floors. Baskets of harvests, curing garlic, and dehydration trays stack in our home. Scent fills the house, tiny insects emerge from folded leafs, fleeing towards light. Sometimes experiments work, and we all eat or drink the results. In winter, we pull out the fire cider, we nurse our stash of our favorite teas, garlic, kimchi. Other times, the batch rots, a fuzzy mold, an acrid taste, a true disdain for fermented ketchup, a family who can no longer tolerate another bite. Filling the composter with a lesson learned. But I keep going.

Sometimes I ache with how much I want to live inside this rhythm full time. To let all of this be enough. To move between garden and studio, between soil and page, blending what I grow with what I see, what I know with what I feel. To make visible what is happening between plant and person, body and sky. To give voice to the small marvels that go unseen. To name the beauty that capitalism cannot quantify.

But this isn’t the world we’re given. I work to survive. I steal hours to create. I try not to lose the thread. I long to shout “I quit” and retreat to the land. But fear lingers under the surface—fear shaped like bills and security and the social weight of being a mother, a woman, a citizen. I’ve only just begun to unpack it.

Still, the garden waits.

It doesn’t demand brilliance. Only presence. A willingness to show up. I try to carry its shimmer—the wild, vegetal light of summer—through the dark folds of winter. To remember that the greenery will return, and I will get to walk barefoot on hot earth again, and feel free and connected for just a moment.

But there’s something else the garden teaches—something that resists the logic of the algorithmic world we’re increasingly folded into.

Technology promises precision. If you’re looking for something, there it is—one search, one swipe, one sterile answer. No friction. No dirt. No weather. But life—real life—is not that. It isn’t built for human-centered production efficiency or constant optimization. It doesn’t always give you what you want. It meanders. It forgets. It surprises. It builds wisdom and imprints on the soul.

Gardening reminds me that the mechanical way of thinking—extractive, reductive, control-based—is a dangerous mirage. The plant world doesn’t obey search engines, SEO, the binary of ones and zeros. There is randomness in adaptation, in environmental response, in factors we can’t perceive through the narrow lens of logic. You cannot demand the same crop from the same soil, year after year, expecting it to yield endlessly. And yet, modern agriculture does just that—forcing the earth into compliance with chemicals and genetic manipulation, dulling its innate intelligence. They do it to plants. They do it to us.

But the real world doesn't operate on command. You plant seeds, and you wait. You watch. You get your knees muddy. Sometimes you receive more than you expected. Sometimes everything dies back, and you learn how to begin again. You feed the soil. You rotate. You diversify. You introduce a little chaos, and it nourishes.

And the garden nourishes more than just plants.

My partner Stephen and I spend nearly every weekend together, kneeling in the dirt. We chat and connect about everything and nothing. We laugh. We ponder. Sometimes we garden in silence, letting the birds hold the sound space. Our bodies ache with the honest fatigue of shared effort. We sweat. We sigh at the blessing of a breeze.

We marvel at what we find—a tiny white spider, a giant millipede, the puzzlement of an unrecognizable volunteer plant, the bright orange roots of something digging deeper than expected. We pull purple vetch from the edges and study the nitrogen nodules clinging to its roots like tiny pearls. We experience the Earth together. In real time. With our hands.

These moments root into our relationship. We weave them into our memory, our sense of time, our idea of what love is. We dream it together. And these are the memories one hopes to carry to death: the ones made of sweat and sun, quiet awe and insect song. This is what we call beauty. This is what we hope to remember.

There is no direct path to a wild strawberry. Some years there are none. Other times, you find one out of the corner of your eye—when you’re looking for something else, when you’re slow, surrendered, and listening. Nature gives randomness. Response. Wild variation. It blooms in disorder. Beauty is uncalculated, and that’s what makes it holy.

Being in relationship with plants is a lesson in humility. A reminder that there are things we cannot deduce or design our way around. That the earth is not a machine, and neither are we. Control is mostly an illusion. Our stress, our fretting—it rarely changes the outcome. We are not here to dominate the ecosystem. We are here to flower. To offer our one strange bloom into the world for the brief season we exist in. To be in relationship with light and soil, to create and share, and let that be enough.