Gardening Reveals What I Love (or Hate) About Myself

And I’ve been committed to it, more or less, for decades

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Gardening, like cooking, or anything solitary and semi-relaxing, showcases our personality quirks and makes them more obvious. (Oliver Sacks, says Maria Popova, equates gardens and music.) Or at least that’s the case for me. When I’m gardening, I’m more aware that I can be obsessive, creative, disorganized, lazy, indifferent, and sometimes mindful — which I, in turn, love or loathe about myself. When I feel laziness is diminishing my accomplishments, I’m self-deprecating; when a laid-back attitude allows me to enjoy gardening without becoming a maniac, I’m glad about that.

I’m a gardener (and a cook) not a farmer (or a chef), so there’s little pressure to actually produce. I garden because I like it; I don’t do it because I have to. This has advantages — crop failure isn’t much of an issue for me — and disadvantages: I can be indifferent at times, which gardens do not like.

All of this has a history, and please bear with me if you’ve read this little bit before. In 1973, when I was 23, I moved into a house on Burnside Avenue in Somerville, Massachusetts. The geography of that city, if not its character, looks the same: houses way too close together, separated by eight- or at ten-foot-wide driveways, tiny…