Evidence
On gardening and the traces it leaves behind
By June, there is dirt permanently embedded beneath my fingernails. I scrub my hands after gardening. I wash them before bed. I own four nail brushes, one of which I can locate with certainty. And still, by this point in the season, traces remain. A dark smudge here, a stain there. Tiny deposits of soil that seem capable of surviving both soap and scorn.
I like it.
This feels like the sort of thing I should be embarrassed to admit as a person who occasionally interacts with civilization, but there is something satisfying about discovering dirt beneath your nails at the end of the day. It’s evidence—proof that for at least a little while, you were somewhere real, doing something real.
I walk out with a straightforward objective: plant the remaining gladiolus. Then I notice grass growing through the mulch. While pulling the grass, I remember I never finished sowing the nasturtiums. While planting the nasturtiums, I realize the cilantro needs thinning. While thinning the cilantro, I notice some peas need coaxing onto the trellis. While whispering to the peas, I discover a volunteer sunflower that appears to have selected its location using a method best described as a combination of divine intervention and bird interference.
The entire day disappears this way. One moment it’s morning. The next, the light has shifted—the shadows are longer, and somebody is asking what’s for dinner. I’ve spent six hours outside and, if pressed, could provide only the vaguest possible accounting of how that time was used.
Well, I moved some dirt.
Then I moved some of it somewhere else.
I tied pieces of string to other pieces of string.
I stared thoughtfully at a rose.
I flung some leftover seeds.
I carried a trowel around the yard before losing it despite actively holding it moments earlier.
At one point I became emotionally invested in a foxglove.
Objectively speaking, not a tremendous amount, and yet it feels like a day well spent.
Indoors, time behaves differently. Indoors, I spend an hour reading the news and emerge feeling less informed than when I started. I devote significant portions of my finite existence to questions such as: Is everyone secretly annoyed with me? What if my haircut is a mistake and has been for years? When did I become an eccentric aunt? Why did I walk into this room? How have I spent forty minutes reading reviews of a product I do not intend to buy?
The garden offers an alternative. Not peace exactly, and certainly not serenity. Nobody watching me wrestle with a tomato cage while muttering expletives to a rooster would mistake this whole situation for serenity.
What it offers instead is occupation—the body is busy enough that the brain finally loses interest in inventing new problems. The hole needs to be deeper. The stake needs to go here. The twine needs to be tighter. The cucumber needs a trellis. The compost needs spreading. The roses need feeding.
The garden feels alive in that early June way, when growth begins outpacing observation. Every time I turn around, something has doubled in size. The peas have climbed another rung of the trellis and look like the ents storming Isengard. The potatoes have gained several inches. A flower bud that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly exists.
For several hours I think about absolutely nothing else. Not the future. Not the past. Not politics. Not grief. Not the strange and endless administrative burden of being a person. Just roots, soil, and whether this hole is deep enough.
The garden simply interrupts the noise for a while. It insists on my participation, and for a few hours, reality becomes wonderfully specific.
By the time I came inside, my shoulders ached and my fingernails were filthy. There was soil in the creases of my hands, chicken feed dust on my calves, and two dark streaks of dirt across my face. Later I’ll probably discover more in some impossible location.
The garden leaves traces—a little dirt on the steering wheel, soil beneath a thumbnail, compost caught in the cuff of a sweatshirt. Tiny reminders that your body was somewhere other than your own thoughts.
Tonight I’ll wash my hands again. Most of the dirt will disappear, but some of it won’t. It never does this time of year. Tomorrow morning I’ll notice it while grinding coffee beans or talking on the phone—a faint crescent tucked beneath a fingernail.
And I’ll still like seeing it there. It reminds me that yesterday, for a few hours at least, I stopped living everywhere else. My hands were in the dirt, and that was enough.
🌱 WAITING FOR GROWDOT
A surprising development in the Growdot saga: the winter-sown columbines worked!
After months of neglect, uncertainty, and what I would characterize as a highly passive management style on my part, dozens of seedlings have emerged. I discovered them while watering the hostas and suddenly remembered that the milk jugs even existed. Hosta la vista, baby!
The columbine seeds, meanwhile, had not forgotten. While I was busy losing track of entire horticultural projects, they were apparently down there germinating with quiet professionalism.
They have since been planted in the garden among their kind, where they will hopefully continue thriving with the same level of competence they have demonstrated thus far.
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
Escape from Alclucktraz
It started with a sound no keeper of chickens ever wants to hear: collective poultry panic.
I was across the yard gardening very carefully, which is to say I was sitting next to the tomatoes saying things like “Excellent job, guys” while painting my toenails.
Then I heard it.
Not normal chicken noises. Not routine clucks. Not typical barnyard chatter. Not Feather Locklear announcing that a leaf existed. This was a sound somewhere between a car alarm in the 90s and the final moments of a Shakespearean king.
I ran—and there, standing on the other side of the fence like someone who had accidentally wandered through a portal into another dimension, was Emily Chickinson.
She did not appear to have a plan. She wasn’t running or exploring. She wasn’t even particularly far away. She was just standing there with one leg lifted, looking increasingly concerned about a situation she herself had created.
To this day (it happened yesterday) I don’t know how Emily accomplished this. This is a bird whose daily activities generally include standing still, making faint squeaking noises, tilting her head in a pleasant manner, and appearing startled by weather.
The other hens stood behind the fence looking alarmed. Emily stood in the grass looking alarmed. I stood in the grass looking alarmed. I snapped exactly one photograph before breaking into a sprint.
Now, if you’ve never chased a chicken before, I can only describe it as an excellent way to discover exactly how much of your self-respect was conditional. It’s difficult to maintain an air of authority while yelling “EMILY!” and running with your arms extended at full speed after a bird.
I eventually caught her, at which point she abandoned all independence and relaxed in my arms. I felt her tiny dinosaur heartbeat racing. Neither of us seemed interested in extending the situation any further. I carried her approximately two feet back to the fence, and then, because there simply was no other option, I gently tossed her over it.
She fluttered down among the others, who immediately lost interest. As did I.
Emily’s daring escape consisted primarily of standing in a slightly different patch of grass for approximately two minutes before being apprehended.
The crisis is over. For now.
🥕 PICK ME DIRTY
Lettuce Pray
The garden has officially begun producing food, which means I am now officially insufferable. This week’s harvest: lettuce so beautiful I briefly considered framing it instead of eating it.
It’s deeply satisfying to walk outside and harvest a meal from a patch of ground that, not very long ago, looked empty. I planted these in April. I worried about them in May. Now they’re lunch.
The whole thing feels wildly improbable and possibly a bit magical, even when it’s happening exactly as planned.
🌹 BLOOM REPORT
Lupine—As though a committee of very talented bees, fresh off a reading of The Lorax, had designed a flower.
Delphinium—A hundred white blossoms stacked carefully atop one another, turning a flower into something closer to a monument.
Rose ‘Wollerton Old Hall’—Apricot at the center, cream at the edges, and somehow even softer than that sounds.
🌸 PETAL TO THE METAL
Iris You Were Here
For most of the spring they’re just fans of blue-green leaves. Nothing particularly dramatic. Then one morning the flowers open and the whole plant seems to become something else entirely.
Iris look less like flowers than costumes. Something extravagant and theatrical. They don’t so much bloom as arrive—impossibly ornate and unconcerned with subtlety. They make you stop whatever you were doing and come closer, just to confirm that nature really meant to do all that.
These blooms are the color of early morning. Not purple, not white—that in-between shade that only exists for a few minutes at a time, when the sky is still deciding what kind of day it’s going to be. Up close, they barely look real. The petals are thin as silk and crimped at the edges like expensive fabric. The falls spill downward. The beard glows gold at the center.
They arrive at exactly the moment I need reminding. Not of anything profound—just of themselves.
Every year I stop in front of them several times a day. Every year I photograph them obsessively. Every year I think I've appreciated them sufficiently, only to find myself standing there again ten minutes later.
Maybe that’s what love is, at least in the garden. Not discovering something beautiful once, but encountering it again after enough time has passed to be surprised.
The iris has never once changed its routine.
I’m the one who keeps forgetting.
🎧 BEET DROPS
Irma Thomas—"Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)"
For reasons I can’t fully explain, this feels like a gardening song. Maybe it's the devotion. Maybe it's the longing. Maybe it's the willingness to keep showing up for something that breaks your heart and rewards you anyway.
Beautiful photos of your blooms thank you for sharing 🙂
I know you don't know the answer, at least to this day - but you've left us hanging; thank goodness you didn't find Emily Chickinson hanging on a fence wire - but HOW DID SHE GET OUT?? It's always the quiet ones.....