Praying with My Plants

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.

Sometimes I feel like plants pray. When I walk among them, I can almost sense some soft and silent language I am not privy to, but yearn to understand. It’s as if they know they are abiding in the presence of their Creator, ceaselessly blessing and being blessed. 

In midsummer, my delphinium stalks stand tall and proud, reaching up their cone-shaped clusters of foamy-white flowers with a joyful confidence—the kind that seems to say, “See? I am doing what I was made to do; I am living in the love of the One who called me to abide!” 

Watching them, I feel a sort of joy and pride too, because every spring, my delphiniums suffer a blight in their lower leaf clusters, and if I don’t prune off the affected leaves, they won’t bloom so prolifically. Instead, they will wilt in desperation trying to fight the leaf blight while reserving enough energy to form buds. So during the summers as I watch them thrive, I almost feel like they smile a small “thank you” at me for helping them fulfill their design. 

Yet in my own spirit, I feel convicted. They persist, regardless of whether or not I am there to prune away the infection. There is a fortitude they embody without question.

Plants participate in an exchange with the world around them—giving, reproducing, repopulating, and being hospitable to other life forms (like pollinators) who give them something in return. It is a type of interdependency with their environment, but it strikes me that it is also an obedience to their design, and their Designer. A plant doesn’t rebelliously proclaim “No, I won’t do that.” Such a refusal would result in their demise. The more rational approach to that idea says that plants don’t refuse because they have no intelligence equal to the imago dei. True. And yet, does that mean they don’t rest in God’s pleasure, functioning in happy obedience to their design?

As a Christian, true fortitude is only mastered in the presence of God, and it requires deep, immersed prayer. God has always intended to abide with us. Yet we walked away from Him—from His presence and pleasure—and the cacophony of our own avaricious voices drowned out His call to return. 

Yet in my garden, in the presence of my plants, I feel a peace settle over me that wordlessly calls me to tarry, to rest, to refuse the chaos of the day and sit in the quiet that my little sanctuary provides. 

But why? Why are gardens often places of prayer? Why are religious houses of worship often built with chapel gardens or temple pools? The stillness of nature makes us want to converse with the holy, the sublime. And if we sit in the midst of the garden and listen, we might perceive a sort of “stalwart” stillness humming among the greenery and the birdsong—a tangible confidence that love covers all things, because obedience to God’s will is the first step toward the restoration of creation.

I used to think fortitude was a sort of “spiritual stubbornness”—a commitment to “pressing on” and moving through difficult circumstances. But it’s more than that. It’s a deeply rooted submission to the God who rules over you.

For whatever reason, I associate the word “forge” with “fortitude.” The consequences of walking away from God mean that (as the Edenic story shows) in large part we are always struggling to forge a path back to Him—fighting our doubts and convincing our undisciplined hearts to return to His will. 

The poet William Wordsworth understood that nature can teach our unruly hearts this kind of willing obedience. He wrote at least three poems alone addressed to his favorite flower, the yellow star-bloom of the Lesser Celandine. In the ending of one of those poems, he writes that the Celandine’s existence is “uncheck’d by pride or scrupulous doubt.” It is “pleased and willing; meek, yielding to the occasion’s call.” For Wordsworth, the flower was a sort of beacon: patient, longsuffering, and “apostolic, in peace fulfilling.” [1] 

That last line struck me. I think he’s right;

nature is an apostle of Christ. It is poised, always, in a posture of prayer. As garden-dwellers, we were designed to listen, learn, and commune with our Creator from within our natural habitat, in union with it.

The garden’s quiet obedience to its design can teach us what we are always tempted to refuse—a willingness to dwell in the will of God.

In recent months, my prayer life has felt more like forging a path through the thorns and thistles of life, straining to see the light through the trees yet simultaneously casting longing glances over my shoulder at what I’m being asked to leave behind. 

Yet in the great mystery that is the love of God, I’m not forging my own path; Christ “prepared the way” for me. In the center of God’s will is love—the kind of love that is replete with that elusive “peace that passes all understanding.” 

We get a taste of that peace in gardens because plants submit to their Creator’s will—that “stalwart stillness,” if you will. And in the center of that will is His great love. St. Augustine of Hippo described fortitude as “…love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object.” [2]

And “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things” because we love and are loved by Love, Himself. In those patches of peace, we find snatches of a holy pleasure—blessing and being blessed.

Perhaps fortitude isn’t pressing on in stubbornness, but in submission. As I walk my garden each morning, I am slowly settling my heart into the rhythm of my plants’ and flowers’ voices. And in the midst of their prayerful quietude, I can feel my heart slowly syncing with their recondite dialogue; Love is here, and for Him, I will bear anything.

Endnotes:

[1] Wordsworth, William, “To the Same Flower” in The Book of Flowers: Wordsworth’s Poetry on Flowers (Ragged Hand 2020), 15

[2] Augustine, translated by Richard Stothert, On the Morals of the Catholic Church Logos Virtual Library: St. Augustine, accessed 7/15/2024 https://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/morals/15.html

The featured image, “Autumn Rose and Bee,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Christina Brown

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.