New Ways of Looking

The garden is done for the season. Last week, I stopped by to look at the few scraggly bean plants on the fence and spied a few bean pods still hanging on. Surprisingly, they were still green. A woman from the nearby apartment complex came up the sidewalk as I was picking, and said, "How do you see those? I walk right by and see the plants, but I don't see anything to pick."

And that's the fun thing about having a garden. You learn to look at the world in new ways. Experience with plants and growing things makes a gardener look at a big mass of green leafy vines entirely differently from someone who isn't a grower. And I still consider my self a beginner-intermediate gardener. I like going into gardens with the real experts. Their eyes are fully trained to spot problems and opportunities, where I still see almost nothing.

One thing I like about the 200 Foot Garden is that it's a way to impact a whole lot of people who are walking past the garden, who before might not have looked twice at plants growing on a fence, but over the course of this year, and our future years, they'll learn to see in entirely new ways. They'll learn to spot the beans and cucumbers, they'll know when the garden needs rain, they'll pay attention to the seedlings starting to climb up the fence. And their relationship to the world and the earth will change, ever so slightly.