Of All Things

Me in the old community garden circa early 2000s

The truth is, I don’t really know why I started a website about growing things. I’m sure there were reasons, but I wasn’t entirely conscious of what they were. I have always made things and this was a thing that I wanted to make. I didn’t want to be a writer, except that I also, perhaps not-so-secretly did. I didn’t sit down one day and say to myself, “Okay, here’s the thing: I want to be a writer and even more-so, I want to start all over again and build a career as a garden writer, OF ALL THINGS.”

It didn’t happen that way, which is not how I imagine it happens for a lot of people. Instead, I imagine a frenzy of research, online courses, books for dummies, spreadsheets, and a whole lot of note taking. A degree in horticulture seems to matter, or so I’ve been told at one time or a dozen, when the question of my belonging and value was raised.“Oh, so you’re NOT a Horticulturalist. Because, just so you know, Martha only has Horticulturalists* on the show.” A childhood apprenticeship with a generous and wizened gardening relative is a popular, if not expected route. So is having a yard. One must be of a certain pedigree. A little cash in the bank helps.

For me, there was no intention, and yet, beyond that lack of intention lay every intention. There was no five year plan. I thought I was going to be a graphic designer, and for a time, I was. Before that I planned to be an artist until the reality of art school — who makes it and who doesn’t, which is to say, pretty much nobody — hit me hard in the gut. Going back further I was on track to be a biologist, but my parents didn’t want me to pursue it. I was to be a nodding bobble headed housewife and a baby maker for Christ. As it happens, I didn’t want any of those things, including a bachelors of science.

I didn’t have a “real” garden back then. Do I even have one now? I mean, I don’t own the house or the land it sits on, so in the eyes of many, it simply doesn’t count. What I had was a wild menagerie of pots on a rooftop and a few more inside a small apartment. I had tentatively stuck a shovel into the hardpan earth of a small patch of City land on the side of the building where I lived, which was located on a raucous city corner in a dirty, low income neighbourhood where men drove down from the suburbs to pick up prostitutes, night and day, and people dumped out their shit, quite literally, right on the street. I stuck the shovel in, and over time I did it some more until I unearthed the entire rectangular patch of weeds, broken car parts, and used needles that was bordered by the wall and the sidewalk. I worried every time I went out there that I’d be caught and arrested, but the cops didn’t care about an illicit garden or its gardener.

Before this place where I stopped stopping, there was a series of inexplicable, attempted starts and unsurprising stops. There was a small vegetable patch, dug, planted and tended in the back of an over-crowded student house. Everything grown there, including the soil, was donated by a friend’s dad. That garden was a lifesaver because eventually the food that came out of it was almost all I had to eat. This was preceded by an African violet on a sunny ledge in a shared, but lonely dorm room; an old apartment populated by a handful of plants grown from grocery store seeds and cuttings from an understanding high school biology teacher; and a failed attempt at raspberries and onion sets in the practically sunless, rocky yard behind it. Going back further still, to life before, with parents, I remember a shovel and a patch of scraggly lawn hidden behind the shed. There were no seeds to plant, just the need to make a garden and nothing to put in it. And reaching back further still, to five and ten year-old me are the tiny weed seeds I planted with fumbling, child fingers for pocket change and a magical parsley seedling in a styrofoam cup that sat on a ledge, in a small bedroom, inside a house that held secrets.

What I had, more than anything, was an inexplicable drive to have plants in my life and a need to find meaning in it.

I didn’t say to myself, “I will now build a blog and become modestly Internet famous,” because there were no blogs then and Internet famous wasn’t a thing to be. There was never the thought about the long term, or financial gain, or making it big. I came from out of a 90s youth culture that was about making things for the sake of it. For being creative and using what you have. I was a degenerate former art student trying to make an adult living post university and big debt. I had a negative bank account and no fallback plan… or anything to fall back onto period. I left home at 17 and by then I’d already long overstayed my welcome. I stayed for as long as I could because I wanted an education and I knew that couldn’t happen if I ended up on the street. I stayed until the moment arrived when I knew I couldn’t stay a second longer. He’d kill me; it was just a matter of when. I stayed for as long as I did because I knew that living on the street could kill me too.

I wanted to live.

So I left my childhood home, and what I took with me were some coping skills and a backlog of trauma, pain, and loss. Years later, when I stopped stopping and started gardening for good and then, god forbid, beyond all logic and reason, started writing about it, all of who I was seemed so very wrong for a garden writer. It was too much darkness for someone who tells stories about these remarkable green beings that live in the sun. I was an unremarkable human being raised in the shadows. What right did I have to speak of things so outside of my world?
What I didn’t know then is that gardening is more than sunshine and the pursuit of a flawless, unattainable flower. The garden is nature filtered through the lens of human culture. We bring our flawed and messy selves into these little Edens that we create, ironically enough, as an escape from that original flawed and messy world. So when we make a garden, for better and for worse, and very often despite ourselves, we bring all of our shit along, too. We can’t help it. What this means is that the garden is everything we want and everything we don’t. It is the personal and the political. It holds our hopes and our sorrows. It reveals our ugly, greedy, most malignant selves as well as our tender, highest potential.

I didn’t think I fit in with the world of the garden. I sometimes still don’t. But I pressed on anyway and I continue to press on still, because no matter what sort of world people try to construct around the idea of a garden, the everyday experience of living alongside plants reveals over and over exactly where it is that I belong and that is to the garden, not the other way around.

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* The show producer said, Horticulturalist, but the correct term is Horticulturist. The irony in this error was not lost on me.

Gayla Trail
Gayla is a writer, photographer, and former graphic designer with a background in the Fine Arts, cultural criticism, and ecology. She is the author, photographer, and designer of best-selling books on gardening, cooking, and preserving.

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36 thoughts on “Of All Things

  1. Great piece! The fact that your writing and gardening is influenced by your life experiences, is what sets you apart from other garden writers.

    We need saving from the plethora of blogs from people who just re-gurg what they’ve read in someone else’s article, just for the sake of keeping up their content production. Lifeless, is the word that comes to mind. Hort degrees don’t make a garden writer, that’s for sure.

    I hope your act of sharing and incorporating your experiences is giving you the healing that you seek. It’s certainly a positive thing for those of us reading and processing on this side of the screen.

    • I am not alone. There are others. It just took me a long time to find them because they were not what was placed front and centre. Hort degrees certainly don’t and I knew it even then, but it was repeated often and used against me so frequently that it messed with my perspective. Thanks Caroline!

  2. This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing so personally. Growing things is life and healing for many of us. You expressed it perfectly!

  3. I can’t put into words exactly what I want to say, but I love your writing and I love when you post thoughts like this. It’s what we need in the garden world.

  4. I’ve just arrived at work so can’t write too much now, but wanted to say reading your post first thing this morning and commenting on IG made me a few minutes late for work (no regrets). This is so brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely riveting. I don’t have the words — and probably never will have, which is why I love and need your writing — to express how much this piece moved and inspired me. Thank you!

  5. Thank you for sharing. You’ve been such an inspiration to me for some time both botanically but also just generally. I often torture myself with the whole “this is what I should be doing and this is the correct path to get there” nonsense when in reality I’ve gotten to many good places without following any particular path other than personal instinct and passion.

    • We live in a world that undermines our instincts and individuality and teaches us to ignore it. It’s always good when we can push that aside and come back to ourselves.

  6. The are so many parallels in our stories that yours bloom these big revelations inside me, too. Thank you for writing and gardening and sharing the dark parts.

    • It doesn’t make me feel good to know that others have had similar experiences, but I also know that I’m not alone and it helps to make these connections that reaffirm the not aloneness in not just a, “we experienced similar things” way, but also in a general human condition / we all experience vulnerability and pain sort of way.

  7. What is a “real” garden? Who is qualified to be a “real” garden writer? Fuck the status quo Gayla. Your writing and reflection these days is the best. I see you. This is where it’s at.

    • I agree. I never wanted to be a part of the status quo. But those messages, delivered over and over in so many ways, especially back then when I was younger and still didn’t quite get just how hard people will work to maintain the status quo— really cut hard at times. I pushed back, but it also sunk in. It’s taken a lot of work to let get to where I am now and will continue to take more.

  8. Ya – you keep it real and even put bugs on pedestals. Gardens desperately need all that sh!t. YouGrowGirl

  9. This feels beautiful and true, and I think we need so deeply to acknowledge the full spectrum of life (and gardens): light to darkness. Your work and your truth have influenced many. Thank you for blazing the trail that you have.

  10. I’ve been reading your books and following your blog for many years. Thank you for sharing. I am very conscious of not wanting to write something trite or meaningless in the face of something so meaningful. What I will say is that I’m grateful that you have been by my side in some way when I’ve looked at my messy, beautiful garden and found joy in its not-perfection.

  11. Thank you for writing this. I always had an innate love of plants that never realized itself into a garden until later in life, when I, too, struggled through art school and realized I’d never make a career out of it. I have abandoned all dreams of being an artist and instead am plugging my energies into trying to make a better garden out there. You are one of those who inspire me. I learn so much reading your blog. The photos are fantastic, too.

    • You can still be an artist whether you “make it” or not! I still make art for my own sake and still think of myself as an artist; I just don’t pursue it as a career. Lynda Barry said it best when she said, “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.” Making it or not making it, having an audience for it or not, doesn’t determine the value of the work. You do it for you and that gives it meaning and value.

  12. Dear Non-Bobblehead Housewife Non-Horticulturalist (Is that a double negative?):
    You know I adore you, and never more than when this essential voice of yours, this essence of Gayla (the Non-Bobblehead Housewife Non-Horticulturalist) pours out like it did here. (I am of course terribly jealous, also, because it has been awhile since I had such an inspired, unexpected utterance myself.)
    May there be many more. And as they say: Thanks for sharing.

  13. Thank you for sharing. Your voice is true, your digging is real and your hands are green, not manicured and soft as other bloggers’ with empty voices might be. Much later in life than you were, I find myself wondering who I am also supposed to be now. Well, I’ll look for clue and peace in my garden, and g(r)o(w) from there.

    • As I age it seems that, Who am I now? is a reoccurring question throughout life, which is a good thing because it means we are continuing to grow and willing to make space for expansion rather than trying to stay the same.

  14. I got myself on Instagram just to follow along with your writings when they slowed down here, and I’m so grateful that you’re back here posting often, as I take a social media fast. Your writings have helped me be in the garden and in my body in a more curious and open way. I’m not sure how I first found your blog, but I’m so thankful, every time you post, that I did.

  15. Love this part “We bring our flawed and messy selves into these little Edens that we create, …”!
    Thanks so much for sharing this personal reflection. I’m inspired to grow and write!

  16. I don’t believe a degree defines a horticulturist. I believe the horticulturist develops inside a person, for many varied reasons, beginning with a fierce dedication to plants. In a pageant for horticulturists, you would be crowned the winner, thoroughly deserving.

    Your glorious garden, although in a rented space, is really yours. You could take all its elements with you if you moved, leaving the crappy neighbor behind. (I fret over taking my garden with me when we move… I map out the plan in my head, over and over.)

    I greatly enjoyed reading this eloquent and thought-provoking chunk of your gardening wisdom. Thank you Gayla!

    • I am fine to NOT be defined as a horticulturist. There are many people with the degree behind them who seem to have no passion for plants. I’m a gardener; that term works fine for me. I don’t always feel much belonging to that world, but I do have confidence in what I know, and the curiosity and passion to always learn more.

      I think about moving often too, and how that will go, since, with the way things are in this city, it could be forced on me at anytime. But I also try not to think about it because to move now, in my current state of health, would be a nightmare. Every year here with this strip of land is a gift, even though the neighbours are a part of the deal I could live without.

  17. I love this Gayla.

    You’d be so proud of me: I have a little patio garden now. And it actually looks good. And it’s entirely because of the encouragement that you gave me back when we first met, as well as my continuing to (silently) follow you here.

    You made a difference in this grow girl’s life, is what I’m saying. xo

    • I’m glad you’re still gardening post hurricane. I know how hard it must have been to start all over again and I hope it brings some peace and calm in the midst of the yearly recurring trauma of hurricane season.

  18. Hi Gayla,
    I really loved your rooftop garden. It was so special and it reminded me on gardening in a wooden fruit box on my balcony, when I was a student in the 80’s. I cultivated bell peppers from supermarket seeds. Later, when we moved, I grew tomatoes and zucchinis guerilla-like in our backyard on the roof of an underground carparking. I never ever again grew such gigantic vegetables! Now I own a garden for more than 25 years and I miss the charme of gardening on the balcony or guerilla gardening in our backyard.
    Greetings from Berlin, Germany
    Petra

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