I Thought I Was Planting a Garden. I Didn’t Realize I Was Finding My Way Home.
Recently, I had the opportunity to share the story of my garden and Rooted Wild Hearts with The Garden Society.
When I first answered their questions, I thought I would mostly be talking about gardening. But as I started writing, I realized how difficult it is to tell the story of my garden without also telling the story of my mother, my childhood, coming home, and the work I’m building today.
Because for me, they are all connected.
The garden I left behind
I spent the first ten years of my life in a small town in Indiana. My bedroom overlooked my mom’s garden, and it was one of my favorite views and one of my favorite places to play.
Then we moved away.
I spent the next twenty years away from Indiana, and during that time I never really had the opportunity to have a garden of my own.
Eventually, life brought me back.
When I returned to Indiana as an adult, I found myself living in the same small town where I had spent that first decade of my life. And when I finally began planting my own native pollinator garden, something happened that I wasn’t expecting.
It brought me back to that little girl.
I remember being in the garden one day and suddenly finding myself in tears.
My mother passed away in 2014, and somehow planting my own garden opened a door in my heart that I didn’t know had stayed closed. I felt connected to her again. I felt connected to my grandmothers and the women who came before me.
And I felt connected to a part of myself I hadn’t realized I was missing.
That garden became a way of honoring my mother, but it also became a way of reclaiming myself.
I thought I was planting a garden.
I didn’t realize I was also finding my way home.
What the garden keeps teaching me
Nature has always been one of my greatest teachers, but gardening has allowed me to experience those lessons differently.
When you tend a garden, you get to witness growth, death, change, patience, timing, abundance, loss, and beginning again right in front of you.
You also quickly learn that you can’t control all of it.
I can prepare the soil. I can plant the seed, water it, tend it, and give it the best conditions I know how to give it.
And then I have to pay attention.
Sometimes a plant thrives somewhere I never expected it to. Sometimes something I’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into doesn’t make it. Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening, while underneath the soil an entire process is unfolding that I cannot see.
The garden has taught me that attention matters as much as effort.
Keep showing up. Observe what is actually happening. Make adjustments when they’re needed. And remember that growth doesn’t always happen according to my timeline.
As someone with big visions, I carry that lesson with me far beyond the garden.
Nothing exists by itself
Maybe the deeper lesson, though, has been about relationship.
Spend enough time paying attention to a garden and you begin to see that nothing exists on its own.
The health of a plant is connected to the soil. The soil is connected to water, weather, microorganisms, and everything that has lived there before. Insects arrive. Birds arrive. Plants support one another, compete with one another, provide food and shelter, die back, decompose, and feed what comes next.
There are relationships everywhere.
I’ve started to see my own life that way too.
The garden has made me more aware of how I relate to myself, to other people, to the land, and to the world around me.
It has taught me to listen and observe before assuming I know what is needed.
Caring for something doesn’t always mean intervening. Sometimes it means creating the right conditions and allowing something to become what it already knows how to be.
And it has made me think much more deeply about reciprocity.
I don’t want my relationship with nature, or with people, to exist only around what I can take or receive.
I want to ask:
What am I giving back?
How am I tending this relationship?
How am I participating in its health?
From knowing a plant to having a relationship with it
This is also why teaching has become such an important part of what I want to do.
The more I’ve learned through gardening, herbalism, and working with plants, the more aware I’ve become of how much knowledge many of us have become disconnected from.
For much of human history, people needed to know the land around them. They knew what grew nearby, what was in season, where their food came from, and how plants could be part of everyday life.
I’m not interested in romanticizing the past or suggesting we need to go backward.
But I do think there is something worth remembering.
Learning the name of a plant can be a beginning.
Once you know its name, you start seeing it.
You notice where it grows. You recognize when it returns in the spring. You see what insects visit it. You watch it flower, set seed, die back, and emerge again.
Maybe you begin learning how people have worked with that plant as food, in skincare, or through traditional herbal practices.
Something that used to disappear into the background becomes familiar.
And familiarity can become relationship.
That is what happened to me.
What began as learning became relationship, and relationship became remembering.
Where Rooted Wild Hearts comes in
Rooted Wild Hearts grew from many of these same ideas.
Yoga, breathwork, movement, gardening, plants, natural skincare, and community may look like separate interests from the outside.
To me, they aren’t.
They all bring me back to awareness and connection.
Yoga asks me to pay attention to my body.
Breath asks me to notice what is happening inside me.
The garden asks me to pay attention to what is happening around me.
Plants invite curiosity.
Community asks us to remember that we don’t exist by ourselves.
My hope for Rooted Wild Hearts is to create a place where these things can live together. A place for movement and breath, gardens and plant education, skincare, workshops, music, retreats, and gathering.
A place where people can slow down enough to notice.
To feel their bodies.
To learn the names of the plants growing around them.
To become curious again.
To remember their relationship with the natural world.
And perhaps, somewhere in that process, to remember something about themselves too.
Plant the seed
There is one more thing the garden keeps reminding me.
I can hold a tiny seed in my hand and know, intellectually, how germination works. And still, I find it incredible that contained within something so small is the information it needs to become what it is meant to become.
A flower. An herb. Food.
There is so much we cannot see when we first plant something.
I think our dreams can be a little like that.
We often want to understand the entire plan before we’re willing to begin. I know I can do this too. I have a very big vision for Rooted Wild Hearts, and if I only look at the distance between where I am today and everything I hope it will someday become, it can feel overwhelming.
So I come back to the garden.
What can I plant today?
What can I tend?
What needs my attention?
And what simply needs more time?
I’m learning that I don’t have to know what the whole garden will look like before I plant the first seed.
Maybe none of us do.
Sometimes we plant something without knowing what it will give back to us.
This story grew from a recent feature with The Garden Society, where I had the opportunity to share more about my garden, my mother, and the roots of Rooted Wild Hearts. I’m grateful for the way they brought this part of my story to life.
Read the full Garden Society editorial here →
With love,
Bethany
Comments