Tending my own garden

I’d like to share a silly secret of mine today.

I mostly use this platform to test out thinking and play with high-minded abstract ideas while I “do a PhD”, but in truth, one of the main reasons I’m doing all this (eschewing full time work, enrolled in an extended academic project with social cred) is because it gives me an excuse to garden a whole bunch.

Throughout the COVID lockdowns, when I wasn’t able to do much outside my own house except shop around for toilet paper, I got very enthusiastic about growing succulents. Through a combination of purchases, gifts and sneakily cutting bits off other people’s plants, I amassed about 40 species of succulents and planted them in a sort of carpet in my front garden.

I got pretty obsessive about ducking out to check on them after work meetings and in lunch breaks. I worried about them in the Australian summer heat. I planted them in and moved them around lackadaisically, wondering what amount of sun and water and companion plants would make them happiest.

I’m not a good gardener. Any successes I’ve had have been down to trial and error. I set up a garden arch and planted these gorgeous red-flowering vines which grew all the way round the arch and promptly died. These were replaced by some random self-seeding ivy shoots which became very happy and stayed very happy on the arch.

I’m not a practical gardener. I grow a bit of food, though not much. Chard, tomatoes, parsley. Eggplants and pumpkins this year if I’m lucky. I don’t spend hours out there, really — it’s a few minutes here, a few minutes there with a watering can and a fork.

Gardening, for me, is about learning from the earth. Maybe people with kids feel this way about raising their children, doing what they can and watching and learning and adapting to the needs of the emerging life before their eyes. There’s this important sense of understanding that yes, I can influence things, but I am not (or shouldn’t try to be) in control. There’s a knowledge base. There are websites and forums and how-to books I can access, and I do — but nothing is a better or more rewarding teacher than watching things grow.

For now, this balances really nicely with the uni reading and research. I spend a lot of garden time chewing on abstract ideas — it’s a good way to screen-detox while processing complexity. I’m not athletic. I don’t run or play sports or go hiking. But I need something to feed my physical body, because it’s starving, and almost everything else I do is digital: reading, writing and meetings are screen-based.

Since I know you’re reading this on a screen, I’m curious. What do you do offscreen? What nourishes your body?