Out of the Garden - Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Out of the Garden
JUDITH FETTERLEY

JUL 22

READ IN APP

July 22, 2025
“Out of the Garden”
Shortly after posting my last newsletter I received a phone call. It was my brother. He had a message.
“You have to stop trying to garden, now.”
It was simple, it was clear, it was right on.
“You have already opted for the ‘nuclear’ solution,” he pointed out. “There is nothing further you can do. This surgery has to work or you will be forced to live a compromised life.”
I heard the truth in his remarks. I kept agreeing with him.
“I am not looking for agreement,” my brother replied. “I am looking for compliance.”
Since our conversation, I have been compliant. I have not been out in the garden again, except to supervise the work of others from the security of my rollator. I have acknowledged the insanity of my behavior, thinking I could get back to “normal” after three weeks post-surgery. The surgeon had already declared six weeks the infancy stage and gave me a time frame of 18 months before I would know how well the surgery had worked.
My brother rightly perceived the danger of what I was doing. It is impossible to be out in the garden and not have the sudden need to reach behind one’s back to grab a tool or the weed bucket or even a weed itself. It is impossible not to sometimes diss the kneeler and just get up without its help. It is impossible not to lift more than five pounds. It is impossible not to bend over.
Besides, as any gardener will tell you, the garden is a dangerous place. There are so many things that can trip you up – rough paths, uneven ground, roots, holes, tools left on the ground. Trying to manage a wheelbarrow filled with the kneeler, my tools, buckets for weeds aggravated the danger exponentially. He was right. What was I thinking.
Sara had recognized my insanity of course and had offered the same advice. But Sara was compromised by the compassion of intimacy. She lived with my longing to be back out in the garden, with my anxiety over what was happening to my plants, with my struggle to be meaningful. She was in the kitchen, my brother was in Milwaukee.
I am deeply grateful to my brother for his intervention. He probably is the only person I would have listened to. After all, he is my big brother and he has always looked out for me.
I am out of the garden, and it is hard. How do I manage as this person who must sit on a bench and direct others to weed and edge and stake and pull, as I did recently in preparing the Bethlehem Town Hall garden for a talk and a tour? I feel like an indulged appendage, not an active participant.
Like Othello, my occupation’s gone. The activity that has structured my life for a quarter of a century I cannot, I must not do. Who am I, then, without that work, work which structured my daily life and made it meaningful, which connected me to the larger world of Master Gardeners, which engaged me intellectually as I mapped the paradigm shifts in the field of horticulture through my own experiments and those I engaged in elsewhere?
Perhaps the strangest part of this adventure, if such it be, is how much I miss my plants. After all, every plant on this property is one that I either chose and planted myself or chose and had someone else plant under my supervision. I know them all and I am used to keeping up with their seasonal shifts and changes. They are friends. And I don’t know how they are doing.
I can’t look or I will want to act. And I can’t act. This is paralysis.
The only way out of this situation is to pivot.
To observation without action other than notation. Surely I can train myself to visit my plant friends without needing to help them. Surely I can train myself to find meaning in simply seeing what they are doing. I have never made time for this kind of work in the garden before. Why not now? Why not set aside some time each day to visit some part of my garden and see how the plants in that garden are doing?
To phone hours and tabling and giving talks instead of helping with the demonstration gardens that my Master Gardener friends maintain.
To a return to writing about the garden in more extensive ways. To revising, rewriting, organizing past newsletters into some kind of meaningful collection. To long letters to friends at a distance. To experimenting with journalling.
To a focus on recovery through physical therapy, walking, strengthening activities.
To a reframing of my situation. To a focus on what I can do, not what I can’t do.
This is quite a pivot. I will have to be careful not to strain my back as I make the move.

COMMENT

RESTACK