Seasons of Growth: What Gardening Teaches Us About Time

I live a garden life. It began in my mid-20s with a few tomato plants set out in a Chicago community garden each May, and in my late 40s has grown into acres of green Pennsylvania ground where May planting is followed by summer color and autumn bounty and winter rest. I have always loved beauty and wanted more of it in my life. Living a garden life has allowed me to immerse myself in the beauty I crave, but it has also given me solid ground beneath my feet. No matter the season, my garden tells me where I am, and what I should be doing, and helps me to pause and celebrate the goodness of ordinary life.

If time occasionally feels like an enemy, let this be one more reason why it is good to live as a garden maker and a garden keeper: gardens are forms of beauty that unfold only in time. Like music, they turn the passage of time into a work of art. My flower garden life is exactly that—a way of life. Because I grow a garden, my life keeps a rhythm. Time is no longer an ordinary straight line but a beautiful circle, always returning yet always new. In my garden, I have not only made peace with time; I have become friends with time. After all, it is time that transforms my offering of a seed into the harvest of a beautiful bouquet.

Most of us long for lives filled with purpose and connection. We want to see dreams come true and time redeemed. My garden life has taught me that the seeds of care, cultivation, and attention we plant in our soil do not grow flowers only. They grow a kind of meaningful time that fills up and overflows into every part of our lives and beyond, even into our relationships with others and the communities we help to keep. A garden life is a flourishing life. It is a life in which every season is needed. It is a life in which every moment has meaning. I think this is why my garden journal has become more of a diary. I do keep a separate diary, but more and more it is my garden journal—with its lists of seeds and hopes and dreams and its record of garden parties and special harvests—that seems to reflect my whole life best. How grateful I am to live a green, growing life in this green, growing world. This kind of life begins with a step as small as a single seed. Has the time come for you to plant something new?