Planting Certainty
BY DAVID LEONARD
Photo by David Leonard.
The peony petals litter the ground in the neighbourhood. Faded beauty, but decaying beautifully in their own way on grass and concrete. The lilies are in full bloom, and the smokebush too. The neighbour’s front yard cherry tomatoes are toddlers, while next to them, the beans are shooting for the sky on their trellises, and the smallest baby squash form at their stems. And the roses. The roses climb and cluster on bushes and vines throughout the city, dazzling bursts of colour and scent drawing the birds and the bees, and me.
The plants keep a schedule. Seeds turns to shoots; shoots get leaves, branches, maybe buds; then flowers, then fruit, each step following the next, everything timed just right. And there’s sureness in the timing too. We all watch for the snowdrops and the tulips and daffodils, then the forsythia, cherry, magnolia, then peonies, then the air is filled with cottonwood and black locust. The annual timing and health of the plants might change, but the order of bloom never does. Bright and brave and reliable. Certainty.
I’m watching it happen in my garden, and I’m making mental notes of the progress of my neighbours’ plants on my daily walks from my home office. That home office, like so many these days, is actually a kitchen table, and my schedule is less of a schedule, and more of a messy collection of hours, days, and now months. COVID-19 has upended it all. The video calls blur together, the tragic numbers pile up in country after country, and none of us know how or when it will end.
We’re learning as we go, and we still have a lot of learning to do. Everything is in question; very little is certain. Places are closed, reopened, reclosed, town by town, region by region, country by country. Politicians and doctors and common sense are constantly in conflict, contradiction after contradiction. Uncertainty reigns. Disorder is everywhere.
In that shifting landscape, we’re constantly adapting. Knowing what to do is a moving target when a virus reveals weaknesses in social structures, economies, people. It’s hard to live in uncertainty, and it’s hard to cope with fear and anxiety.
Without a definite end, without a clear sense of the timing of it all, we’re set adrift. The organizing structures of our lives—work, school, social lives—have been tossed out, and we’re forced to reckon with the disquiet that comes from not knowing.
This disquiet and uncertainty is something I know well. My wife, Teva, died last year. Cancer. She was forty-two. Uncertainty defined our years between her diagnosis and her death, and it has defined my year since she died. Teva became keenly aware of time through her disease, and was determined to live with gusto when the only certainty she had was the knowledge that she would die a young woman. She spent a lot of time feeling the world slow down as her organizing structures fell away. She slowed down with it, paying even closer attention to the delicate beauty of nature, to the flowers, to the trees, to the birds, and the pollinators. She spent a lot of time in her garden coaxing the plants to be their best. She marked time by how the garden grew, and how its bounty was inevitable.
I’ve also found myself marking time through nature. Teva died just after the daffodils bloomed, but before the cherry blossoms. A time forever etched into me, with its silvery spring light and the smell of life everywhere. Life and death intermingled as they always are.
Teva had a dependable garden plan, and we always cleared and planted it together. Last year, I gathered some of her friends, and we planted the garden in her honour. It grew wildly over the year, my grief preventing me from weeding or pruning. All I could do was let it grow. All I needed from it was proof of life. I watched the herbs, and the tomatoes, and the peppers all come, mystified that time was moving so quickly. “How could it be pepper harvesting time” I thought, “when Teva just died a few . . . o wait . . . that was five months ago.”
Time lost meaning for me then, and since COVID stopped us all in our tracks, it has for so many. When did we last go to a restaurant or a movie or hug a dear friend? Without our normal routines, we’ve had to relearn how to mark time. I’m spending more of my time in the garden—once ours, now mine. I’m caring for the plants, and coaxing them to be their best. I’m spending time fiddling with the smallest leaves and flowers. I’ve slowed down to the pace of the garden, hands in the dirt. Terra firma is powerful and stable by nature. I’m grounded.
Grief is unpredictable. There are so many aphorisms I’ve been fed, but none prepared me for it. It comes at you when you least expect it and turns emotional solid ground to slurry. It also eases up if you take it slowly. I learned, through Teva and then after Teva, to let go of the need for certainty, and to truly try and live each moment as it comes. I’ve learned to be gentle and patient. This has left me equipped for life in a global pandemic. This time requires compassion, a capacity to deal with anxiety and fear, an understanding of loneliness and the loss of routine, and the knowledge that doing something real and concrete helps. The covid clichés are easy traps to fall into because they all share something valuable. Gardening, making bread, learning languages, all of these things take time and attention. They all follow a clearly defined plan and timeline. They’re concrete and progress is easy to mark. They’re slow and deliberate.
These days, we’re all stripped down to our base selves. We’re grieving our routines, while also dealing with the pain we’ve felt from compounding global tragedies. We’re searching for meaning, and we want to know what we should be doing. During the two World Wars, millions of people were encouraged to plant vegetable gardens to supplement food supplies, but also to boost morale. The governments who encouraged them knew that these Victory Gardens would give people at home something to focus on while the soldiers fought the wars. Time passed, life blossomed, people felt a bit better about living limited lives.
Today, gardens do the same for me. Mine adds shape to each day, and the plants in the parks and yards around me bring joy to my furloughs from my home office. My rose bush has climbed a cedar, and the flowers are unreachably high, popping out from between the boughs of the tree. You have to slow down to notice them, but then it’s like a warm glow settles over you.
There is beauty and there is life and now we’re all moving slowly enough to see it. These deliberate acts of focus don’t solve the global pandemic, but in appreciating the centuries-old cycles at work with these plants, we have something we can depend on. We have something real we can predict, a clear order of actions and inactions, and a determinate trajectory. We have certainty.
The world is untethered, but I can still plant the seeds in full sun in a row, one inch into the ground, no more than six inches apart. I can still watch for aphids, water well, wait.
DAVID LEONARD is Senior Director of 6 Degrees at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, the founding producer of The Walrus Talks, and a former book publicist. He has written for The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire, and created a twitter weather service, the #DLWS. He grew up in Dartmouth, NS, and lives in Toronto.