I didn’t grow much of a garden this year. I was growing something much more important.
I crouched in the neglected garden, saplings rising to eye level—tall enough to mark the seasons I had let it go. I pulled weeds in the hot sun, watching her from the corner of my eye.
She sat on a small pile of leaves, holding a yellow wildflower in her hand—or a weed, depending on where it grows, or who is looking at it. After admiring the color for a moment, she stuffed it in her mouth.
She looked at me, a smile erupting wider than her face, and laughed. I laughed back. Then she kept exploring in the dappled sunlight beneath the big oak tree.
Next it was an old oak leaf. Then it was a stick, which she turned over and over in her hands as if studying it, before tasting it too.
There is a kind of passive learning that happens this way.
Learning that is not instructed nor structured—just felt.
Little hands in the dirt.
Curious objects, studied with all five senses.
A child meeting their world directly, their own teacher.
In those early years, the body is doing quiet work—undergoing constant adaptations, learning, responding, and growing within its environment.
But it’s not just the body that is shaped.
A perspective is forming too.
A child let to play in a garden learns a familiarity. Comfort. Connection—
an understanding that the world is not separate from them, but something they belong to.
And this kind of learning asks very little of the garden.
Not perfection. Not order. Not even productivity.
The garden, in many seasons, is approached as something for output.
If it is ornamental, it must be carefully maintained—beauty and order the goal. If it is for food, it must yield something useful.
But what about the seasons when life isn’t visibly productive?
Is a garden still worth keeping?
Or would we be better off replacing it with something orderly—like grass?
When food can be bought, and time is limited, a garden can begin to feel unnecessary.
When food can be bought, and time is limited, a garden can begin to feel unnecessary.
But the value of a garden is not limited to what it produces.
Even now, in its overgrown state, it offers something.
From the weedy beds, volunteers have appeared—oak and tallow, elderberries and mulberries, among others. Unplanned, but not without purpose.
And for a child, this kind of garden holds something more.
A place for little hands to dig.
A place to find crawly friends.
A place to toss seeds—or plant an acorn.
A place to pick wildflowers for mom—
or eat them.
Beneath the visible disorder, there is still an order that supports life—of itself, and of those who move through it.
And in that space, something else is being cultivated.
The garden becomes a place of orientation—
toward patience,
toward care,
toward belonging,
toward connection.
Not just a place to grow food,
but a place to grow in relationship with the living world.
Even in seasons when it looks like nothing is being produced, something essential still is.