Life is like a flower garden. Unfortunately, we think we are florabundaperennials when in reality we are at best annuals. As time passed and I wised up (no, not a lot, mind you), I settled on thinking that as spring flowers collapse under a summer’s first intense heat wave, my life would somehow abruptly end. But luck, genetics, modern medicine and a very good woman intervened.

Garden life to date has graced me with a few observations — a crucial one at this stage is that a lumpy, up and down, but hopefully long and gentle downhill decline towards total entropy awaits me.

Maybe I’ll round a blind corner and get mowed down like the volunteer wildflowers I didn’t see when I first mowed my overgrown, northern Virginia, suburban yard after a long, harsh, blizzardy, 1980s winter to make it a pristine green space. Those types of accidents could occur; prompting me starting in the early 1970s to begin preparing for them.

And so in small steps I became mostly ready to die without a moment’s notice. That was why I secured life insurance, long term investment real estate and stock market holdings, a will, advanced medical directives, and instructions to my heirs as to what to do going forward.

Still prepared like that today, all I want going forward is for Death to find me, while W and I are harvesting our garden peppers and tomatoes and finally eating one of our garden figs while we lounge one evening in the garden with a glass of wine.

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So, how do those lucky few who reach this three score and ten milestone approach life’s last phases? Perhaps like we do our gardens. We must remember first of all that we are dealing with the human body with its poor flesh; much like a garden’s green beings who rise, flower and fade often in a single season. Old gardens, like aging gardeners’ illnesses, are at times repugnant. One must not always expect to see them either dressed up for a ball, manicured or immaculate.

Count on some disheveled fugly.

We oldsters should one and all be garden explorers and experimenters. We know that the here and there should not matter. We understand that we must be movingonto and into other intensities. Gardens are the perfect place for that. They provide a further union, a deeper communion, with life.

Gardening and sitting in W’s creation is one of my life’s great joys — even among those things like our red-berried Savannah holly trees, sky-piercing pencil trees and 20+ foot tall, clumping stands of deep blue bamboo, all which might tauntingly be there for posterity. In the evening hours when the tiered fountain springs to life and its gently falling water droplets are highlighted by the pencil beams of landscape lights to appear as if they were cascades of diamonds, I have learned that this septuagenarian has no right to count even on being like annuals but to focus like I was single day flowering rosebud.

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So, from our Coastal Empire garden, here’re a few initial notes about us human flowers’ life cycle of budding, flowering and fading:

Don’t fear days upon days of hot sun –put in timer-controlled, drip watering systems for regular sustenance (water as well as wine and bourbon for us).

A water feature or two like a garden fountain or a stream/creek (like beach visits for us bi-pedals) brings joyous sound, wildlife, and refreshing contrast and pause to us all.

Learn to love the fall despite the fading blooms. It has great smells and fabulous leaf colors, the lawn grass stops growing and, most of all, the family’s lawn mowers are put away. Consider hiring a lawn boy to free up more of your remaining time to garden.

When I finally began to pay attention, gardens and their care slowly, silently, inexorably taught me about mortality. By stages it made me sober, sad, and then mindful of my limitations and the beauty in and around me. I have begun to have a plan to live sensibly, lovingly. and peaceably. For the most part I have stopped clinging to my life’s past spring-ness and summer-ness and turned towards embracing fully and powerfully my current fall-ness. Winter’s coming.

Some say that during this life phase we are finally blessed with a poetic, intense love of life. Until that arrives, in our garden I am learning to embrace my earthiness’s existence and enjoy it while it lasts. My childlike, vague hopes of immortality have nearly disappeared into the mists.

I cherish watching the nectar drunken bees stagger from plant to plant in our garden with their backs and bellies coated in pollen while the butterflies flit and dance their complex, modern, aerial ballet dances. I laugh and deeply appreciate them for their utterly ceaseless work and beauty. They are like the Divine’s secret messengers to me. They carry the decoder to me daily about what life is all about.

Even though this old flower sometimes feels half or more buried in his garden’s leaves, I sweep the decay from my still sturdy stem to breath in the air and bask in the sun there and bloom again for one more day.

Oh yeah, I should have whispered this earlier — gardens may be lively, rotty, heavenly, underworldly, vegetative and subtle places, but they are the most pagan and sex and death filled places on earth.

As a side note, I still resist buying in the early spring larger and more mature annuals in order to up my chances of being around to see them fully bloom. I may part with that practice as I further age. Maybe not.

Cut some blooms to bring inside and harvest some veggies to eat from time to time as things ripen. This prevents sulking when they are snatched away by pests or bad weather.

Good looking gardens hide the heartbreaking mistakes it took to get them that way. W’s is no different.

Gardeners are never, truly old. We are young at heart optimists, dreamers and schemers. Next year will always be better.

The constant nearness of a garden’s constituent plants’ demise is a gardener’s greatest test of character.

Our nation’s greatest public spring tree garden — Washington DC’s Japanese cherry trees around the Tidal Basin — has blossomed every year since it was planted in 1912. I will die long before I reach 107, but I was fortunate to spend many afternoons and evenings during two decades among those graceful blooms. All Washingtonians should do so.

Thus far by my count, I have killed more plants than have survived in or on my soils. Luckily, I have escaped charges of horticultural euthanasia.

Each spring’s bloom brings a miraculous cure to my common oldster birthday maladies that we all endure as time marches quickly by us.

All my gardens have contained the remains of my pets. Sweet memories of them are resurrected with each spring’s blooming.

Carefully layer your friends as you do garden flowers and bulbs. This resulting richness will be a delight.

Dust to dust. In between we should garden.

We can touch the infinite within a garden’s impermanence.

Gardening teaches patience and attention to detail. It rewards hard work, swinging for the fences, and utter trust with beauty and bounty.

When gardeners sit quietly in their blooming creation at the end of the day, they fully meet nature halfway face to face.

Life and gardens have thorns but also roses.

We should live each day as if it were our last, and garden our lives as though we will live forever.

Copyright 2019 My Isle Seat
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