The winter solstice, the holiday season, and the coming of the New Year often are a contemplative time for me, but perhaps never more than this year. With my mother’s death in October, I became a member of the oldest living generation in my family. As bleak as that can sound, it also has its merits—I find a comfort in both what I know and have learned over the years as well as an awe for the world around me with which I believe we are all born.
Heading to Chicago to celebrate the holidays with my sisters and their children and grandchildren, I am taken by the landscape as we drive across upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio along with our dogs Henry and Billy. Snow accompanied us along most of the route. As it settled on the old apple orchards and groves of sumac that run along the highway, the leafless trees displayed the beauty of their sculptural woody forms that are masked in other seasons by leaves and fruit.
I cannot help but feel the loss of my mother in these moments, but also the beauty of her later years, a time when her wizened form was matched with an ability to see beyond the leaves, flowers, and fruit that command our attention in our youth. I do not yet know—and may never know—what it is like to take in the natural world for almost a century, but thanks to her I have a confidence that the natural world will never cease to astound me and teach me something new.
This vision informs me as we pass some snow-covered teasel on the farmland’s edge along the highway. Teasel was first brought to this country with a purpose—to card wool with its seedheads—but it outlasted usefulness as technology found more efficient ways to prepare wool, only to be then deemed an invasive plant that did not belong in our landscape and should be eradicated. It serves as a reminder of how temporal our vision of the world can be. And now, as some herbalists examine teasel’s medicinal properties and advise using it to reduce inflammation and to fight a variety of illness, it shows how the presuppositions we hold to so deeply can evolve through the passage of time.
Once in Chicago, I walk the dogs by my old elementary school and look into the windows of my third-grade classroom. I think back to when my peers and I learned about the magic of germination by setting beans with some water into Dixie cups one Friday afternoon. The teacher then placed them in the dark cabinet under the sink, only for us to see on the following Monday how the dried beans had imbibed water and broken dormancy. Their radicles had extended forward, and the emerging cotyledons split the beans in half. To this day, this simple act inspires awe in me and reminds me of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk that my mother would read to me on occasion before putting me to bed.
I hope in the New Year that I can continue both to connect to the awe I felt about such things in my youth and to combine it with the wisdom I hope I have acquired over the years, and with any luck to live up to the expectation set by my mother for what it means to be the oldest generation. In her tradition, I hope to carry wonder and the acquisition of knowledge through my century on the earth—and to pass it along to the next generation.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
