Thanksgiving, and the Ever-Giving Garden

As we give thanks this November, the garden is surely on our gratitude lists. Once we acknowledge family, friends, health, and wealth enough to sustain ourselves, we gardeners arrive at the ever-giving garden as something for which to give thanks.

The garden can connect us to those other more important “mentions” on our gratitude lists. We can garden with family and laugh and cry about failed garden projects, the chipmunk that ran off in autumn with all our spring-blooming bulbs, and the memories that certain plants hold for us (“Nana loved hollyhocks”). Thank you, garden, for reminding us….

Gardening can introduce us to likeminded friends who take pleasure in conferring about things that others would find dull-as-toast. (No disrespect, toast. You actually make one the best breakfasts around.) From thoughts on the best pointed-tip shovel to how to get rid of sooty mold, these other plant people become especially close to us gardeners. Thank you, garden, for bringing us together.

Gardening can keep us fit, with all the bending and stretching required to do it well. We might age a little less, or at least notice our age not quite as much as we would if we were not gardeners. (That doesn’t apply to the night that immediately follows a big clean-up or other gardening project—that’s when everything hurts. But the hurt fades.) The garden forces us to get up and go, and on days when we just don’t feel like it, the garden provides a perfect place to feel the breeze, hear the birds, and just relax. Thank you, garden, for letting us know we are alive.

Gardening can turn from a hobby into a bit of a livelihood. Does your apple tree produce too many apples for one family’s consumption? Maybe that old apple butter recipe is marketable on some scale. True enough, we gardeners might be more aware of how gardening can detract from our wealth: We might think we buy too much. We can’t resist a plant here and a shrub there, so we use our wealth to acquire those things. But even if that apple butter recipe “goes nowhere”, and even if we do spend a bit more than we should, the garden adds to our wealth of pleasures, if not our monetary wealth. Thank you, garden.

No, the garden should not take top billing on our Thanksgiving gratitude lists. Other things are more important. People are more important. Animals are more important. (I know you didn’t expect that latter one from a fellow gardener, but I’d take a free and happy bunny over a perfect, never-eaten flower mound any day.) But the garden is important. 

Some people may go through life considering the small patches of land they have to be burdens. “Can’t wait to be done with that mowing….” “I would never add plants that need to be deadheaded… gardening… too much work.” But these people don’t know what they’re missing. We know what the garden is all about. We know what it gives us. And we give thanks.