The Cultivating Gardener is a column designed to engage all garden lovers, regardless of skill or experience, as we glimpse, together, the deep tenderness of God hidden in our own backyards. In this column you will find reflections, resources and tips designed to help you expand your vision of what it means to cultivate your own plot of land. As you pursue this good and holy work of garden-tending, my hope is that you will find your own heart lovingly tended by the Great Gardener of both our soils and our souls.
Do you ever feel like you don’t have permission to be merry? I do. But as a child, that thought never crossed my mind. I simply embraced merriment when it came my way without questioning why I might or might not “deserve” it.
Croquet was my favorite game to play during our summer visits to my grandfather’s old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. He was an unstoppable champion. Only once was I lucky enough to beat him at the game, and it was the highlight of my summer.
Each July, road-trip weary and stiff, my siblings and I would jump out of our mini-van, dusty from the old dirt roads in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, and run to the front door, where my grandparents were waiting to hand out hugs (and M&M’S, but those always came later).
I would count the hours until my grandfather agreed to play. We’d punch the metal hoops into the sod, (knowing to avoid as many of the gentle slopes as we could), choose our mallets (my favorite was the green-striped one), and begin. That first “thwack” of the ball meeting the wooden mallet was utterly thrilling; the game was on!
During our visit I would get my grandfather to agree to as many games as he’d let me. But when my persuasions failed, I skipped off to play and explore the old property. I wasn’t worried—there was an inexhaustible list of options.
The barn adjacent to the farmhouse had burned down many decades ago, and the house was a lonely, white box-shaped dwelling sitting at the peak of a hill. A long, flat one-acre lawn stretched out along the eastern wall before dropping steeply into a wild, untouched slope of native grasses. We’d often lose our Frisbees on that hill and painstakingly hunt for them amongst the thigh-high grass and rogue groundhog burrows.
We flew kites and played badminton on that lawn. We climbed the trees in the small apple orchard, picked berries from the massive old blackberry bushes hedging the run-down shed, and searched for buried treasure amongst the charred embers of the old barn. For lunch, we enjoyed the incomparable taste of my grandmother’s homegrown tomatoes in our turkey sandwiches, still warm from the ruby kiss of the summer sun.
Those were the days. And I miss them.
It’s not possible to wholly recapture or relive our idyllic childhood experiences. But the imprint of mine upon my memory has tethered me to a grounding reality that counters the all-encompassing stress of responsibilities, distractions, and grief that adulthood brings. Merriment matters.
When I got pregnant, I knew it was going to be important to me to foster that same kind of outdoor play, encouraging my children to grow in a healthy (and somewhat independent) relationship with nature.
And over the years as I’ve watched my children play in the garden, I began to realize how much playfulness was lacking in my own life. (Funny, how having children forces you to grow up in some ways and in others, reminds you how to be a kid again.) Eventually, I began curating my own backyard space to meet the needs of my own heart alongside my children’s.
As an adult, I never considered myself a “playful” person until my early 30s. Now, I wholly inhabit that role (at least when the situation calls for it).
“Merriment,” in the modern sense of the word, is akin to gladness and playfulness. We often use it like a verb or an experience. We “make” merry. We choose to play—to inhabit the joviality associated with merriment and enter a realm where our senses are excited through our experiences. “Making merry” is an action.
When I acquired my first garden “canvas” five years ago, it was exciting. Opportunities abounded. The yard was just waiting for an invitation to be something. All I needed to do was figure out what it wanted to be. And while the garden has morphed and expanded over the last few years, it has only multiplied in the purposes it serves. It is a soccer field, an Easter-egg hunt treasure-scape, a Shakespearean stage, a summer cocktail party backdrop, a battlefield for knights fighting dragons, and do you know what else it is? A croquet lawn.
Two years ago, in May, I was thinking about what I might want for my birthday (which happens to be early June). And I had a thought:
“Christina,” I said to myself, “you have a yard. You love croquet—you’ve always wanted to own a croquet set of your own—what are you waiting for?”
I remember excitedly telling my husband, “I want a croquet set for my birthday! And I want to have a party with my friends and play croquet! I want to call it, ‘Croquet and Cocktails!’”
And so I did. I wore a bright pink dress, enjoyed a cocktail, and laughed myself blue-in-the-face with friends who were all bemoaning their abysmal croquet skills alongside my own dismally out-of-practice ones.
And you know what else? I used the green mallet. Green: the color of the grass, the trees, the flowering shrubs—the color of all the foliage of the garden flowers I’d carefully cultivated over the past several years. Green; the color of resurrection, the color of rejoicing, and somehow, the color of merriment.
Now, during the summers, it’s hard to pull any of us out of the backyard. (Yes, extreme heat or violent thunderstorms will do it, but that’s about it!) We even play “frost warriors” when the first frost of autumn comes. My children and I grab frost tarps, stakes, shears, and twine, putting on our fiercest faces and wrapping the tarp cloth about our shoulders like cloaks to fight the frost for the sake of our thriving Cosmos and Heliotrope. (And yes, my son will throw garden stakes like javelins or use them in ninja-like acrobatics. I often join him. Because, why not?)
As I write this piece, my seven-and-a-half-year-old daughter is recording a video on my phone to send to her godmother, walking around our backyard as I sit here on the patio and watch her give a walking “tour” of the yard. I heard and saw snippets as she “showed” her godmother the budding lilac blossoms (“I love it when trees have flowers!”), the juniper bush berries (“See the berries? When I was little I used to think they were baby spiders.”) and showing off our one-year-old sapling we planted last May (“Lil’ Lollipop; isn’t she beautiful? Her leaves used to be pink but now they’re green ‘cause she’s still growing.”)
My beautiful, blonde baby girl is walking the yard, barefoot in a floral skort, a stained T-shirt, and sparkly blue flower clips in her long, thick, blonde hair (it’s crazy that I used to think her hair would never grow!), sharing pieces of her outdoor world with a person she loves dearly.
The Colorado earth is green now, and the wind is tousling the freshly sprouted leaves. Only yesterday, it seems, we were locked indoors amid sub-zero temps, wondering if warmth was a figment of our imaginations and those summer evening bike-rides really happened, or if evenings were always dark, always cold, always quiet.
And yet, my barefoot princess is now roaming the green yard beyond our door in the sun-slanted evening sky, where just moments before she was drawing hopscotch squares on our flagstone path with salmon pink chalk, jumping confidently from square to square with playful abandon.
Children can do that. Play with abandon. Adults must try harder. We have to choose to play and make merry.
I have several gardening T-shirts that I wear just for gardening. My favorite T-shirt pairs an image of a spade, gardening gloves and a flowerpot with a phrase that makes me (and my children) smile each time I wear it. It reads like wisdom from an old sage. So I’m sharing it with you, too, my friends. For as the garden and my children have reminded me,
You’re never too old to play in the dirt.
The featured image is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
A founding member of The Cultivating Project, Christina has been fascinated by beauty her whole life. Color, texture, pattern, fragrance, melody, light – all of the boundless ways in which creation shines – ignites her imagination, compelling her to create. Even as a wee sprite, Christina was dedicated to wordsmithing and sketching her way through its marvels in an attempt to capture, at least partially, the imprint of the Creator within it. But writing and drawing are not her only creative endeavors; several years ago she took on the laborious (but rewarding) task of nurturing a garden in the dismal soils of the Rocky Mountain foothills, and has eagerly employed her spade (alongside her pen) as a tool to cultivate and curate the beauty around her.
She has two little gardeners-in-training who embody all these marvels and more in their merry little faces. She and her husband Brian are the founders of the Anselm Society based in Colorado Springs, whose mission and calling is a renaissance of the Christian Imagination. She serves as the Director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild and her creative work can be found at LiveBeautiful.today and on Instagram.
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