Many years ago, when our son Matthew was a toddler, my husband and I took a parenting class. On the first day, the teacher asked each person to tell what they’d like to learn in the class. When my turn came, I said, “My son keeps driving his toy cars over my great-grandmother’s 100-year-old cedar chest that I just refinished. Since it’s the only nice piece of furniture in the house, I want to train him to stop doing that. Otherwise, I don’t have any problems with my son.” The teacher gave me a funny look and went on to the next person.
The following week’s lesson was on how to discipline children. About halfway through the class, I raised my hand and asked, “But what about my cedar chest?” The teacher coolly replied, “Move it.”
There were lessons in that remark that have taken me years to learn.
I suppose all parents harbor secret ambitions for their children. My dearest ambition was that my children become great gardeners. I envisioned them following me around, asking to help pull weeds and begging to be told the Latin name of each flower. But that’s about as realistic as expecting a two-year-old to stay off an antique cedar chest.
We moved to our first house with a yard when Matthew was five. At the time, there were only three plants on the property -- a stately weeping birch tree in the center of the backyard, a wasp-infested arborvitae next to the porch, and an overgrown grape vine covering the chain-link fence. Being an industrious child, Matthew immediately set to work peeling the lovely white bark off the birch tree and swinging from its branches like Tarzan. To distract him from these destructive pastimes, we installed a swing set. (See? I had learned something from that parenting class, after all.)
The following spring, my husband and I dug up half the grass in the yard to make room for our new garden. I designed it with neatly mulched paths that wound around, sometimes splitting off in two different directions, and sometimes curving gently around an eye-catching focal point. In my eyes, the new garden was a work of art. Matthew thought it was his personal racetrack, and he skidded around the corners, kicking up the mulch like a young colt.
Trying to discourage this without making my child hate gardening, I offered him his own little plot of dirt where he could plant whatever he liked. Predictably, he chose giant pumpkins and sky-scraping sunflowers. In spite of the way the sunflowers broke all the garden-design rules ever written, I let him have his way. Of course, he lost interest in gardening as soon as the packets of seeds were empty, but his plants thrived on neglect.
So did the weeds. Whenever I hinted that his garden needed weeding, Matthew mysteriously disappeared. It wasn’t until that autumn that I discovered his hiding place, the overgrown grapevine. No wonder he never had much appetite for dinner on weeding days.
We continued giving Matthew his own little plot each year, even though some years he just used the space to dig a BIG hole. Once he actually admitted that he was trying to tunnel to China. Another year, he bet me that he could grow bigger onions than I could. Several weeks into the challenge, I was surprised to see that he was winning. What I didn’t know was that he was snitching my expensive, organic kelp fertilizer and watering his plants with it every day.
Matthew turned 17 this year. He no longer runs irreverently through the garden, kicking up the mulch. In fact, he rarely goes into the garden at all. So I was surprised one day to look up from my weeding and see him standing there, looking thoughtful and attentive. To start the conversation, I pointed out one of my favorite rare penstemons. He glanced at it briefly, then said, “Hmmm . . . Mom, can I have the keys to the car?”
Well, what did I expect? In an earlier time, he might have asked for a blossom to dissect and study – or, more likely, to light on fire with a magnifying glass. But he’s too old for that now. His thoughts are filled with cars and girls and laptop computers.
Still, I miss the unruly little boy who once broke into my cupboard bag of home-dried tomatoes and ate the whole thing. I was reminded of those days recently when we went to a family party. My daughter Kate brought along a bag of homegrown gourds to share with her cousins. One of the cousins, a five-year-old boy named Alex, showed an unusual amount of interest for a kid whose chief passion is playing with trucks and army men. When Kate showed him a small, round, green-striped gourd, he asked, “Is that a watermelon?”
“No,” Kate replied, “it’s a gourd.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Alex excitedly, “it’s a gour-nade!” He hefted the little piece of weaponry with a gleam in his eye, looking around for a target.
It’s comforting to know that a new generation of little boys is learning to love gardening.
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Copyright (c) 2007 Diane Linsley, Diane's Flower Seeds. All rights reserved. This article was published in GreenPrints magazine, issue no. 70.
