First Post: Why do you Garden?

a monarch caterpillar (Danaus plexippus) I found chowing down on milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)

Why do you garden? To answer this question for yourself, I suggest jotting down the times your life has intersected the domain of gardening. Did a close relative garden when you were growing up? Did you take a botany class in college? Did you just get hooked by watching YouTubers show off their bountiful harvests? Putting your story into words may not exactly answer the question posed here, but it can be both enlightening and satisfying to read your own narrative.

Or, perhaps you don't garden. That's okay too! I think there are gardeners and then there are potential gardeners. Just follow my blog and you'll grow a green thumb in no time 😉 In fact, feel free to read below about how I came to love this hobby so much.

Like many children, I grew up with a mother whose hobbies included gardening. Our yard was graced by the occasional vegetable patch, but Mom largely focused her energy on landscaping so that our house looked like a home. My memories of that home include the heady aroma of an oleander bush on warm spring breezes and the eye-grabbing contrast of a lime green sweet potato vine next to a patch of purple heart plant. I remember one year my mom experimented with strawberries as a ground cover. Ten-year-old Luke approved heartily of this choice, but so did every squirrel and bird in our neighborhood. Some of my earliest memories of gardening include long drives to a nursery, where I would pretend the rows of plants were a wild jungle. Still, I was too young and too stereotypical to be interested in gardening as a kid. I left that hobby to my Mom and I took for granted the backdrop of botanical beauty she created for us.

sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) and wandering Jew plant (Tradescantia pallida) photo I found here https://www.pinterest.com/pin/538672805401487359/?lp=true

I may not have been a horticulturally driven child, but neither was I a stranger to the outdoors. The kids in my neighborhood would play on what we called “the back trails”: a network of forested dirt pathways that veined our small city of  about 8000 people. I thought of these trails as a hidden highway. You could really get around if you knew which trail snaked behind which neighborhoods. Luckily for me, my family would also vacation in the mountains of Colorado or (more frequently) at our lake cabin. And few high school years passed by that I didn't spend a few weeks camping in the woods with my Boyscouts troop. Thankfully, my early years were full of fun times spent outside.

a snapshot from ancient footage of my oldest siblings and Dad at the lake (I think this image has about four pixels)

With so much exposure to nature growing up, it is not surprising that I chose to work at a botanical garden between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I am forever grateful to those at Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center for their generous education about the local flora and fauna as well as the surrounding Orange TX culture and history. Though I was technically an employee, my most cherished payment came in the form of lessons concerning the plants and animals I had seen for eighteen years yet never really noticed.

t-shirt from the summer job at Shangri La

It was with these memories that I moved to one of the largest cities in America for college to study biology. I sought out greenspace in Houston, but that didn't sate my appetite for nature. The city seemed like a concrete jungle. I remember excitedly helping one of our environmental science students revamp the senior dormitory’s courtyard garden so that we didn't have to walk by a dull patch of dirt every day. While we wheelbarrowed soil to the garden bed and stuck native flowers in it, one of my friends said “It feels so good to feel this dirt with your hands!” I didn’t tell her this at the time, but I wanted to reply with a “Well duh! That's what humans are supposed to do!” I think this moment brought an unconscious ache into focus, like pressing your thumb into an old bruise. I needed gardening!

the crew that helped revive our dorm garden with native plants

However, there came a simultaneously harsh realization that I couldn't do as much as I wanted until I owned a house with a yard. So, I began the long germination period of living vicariously through YouTube gardeners and even keeping a balcony container garden. The hours I spent essentially watching grass grow on my balcony left me with a deep hunger for my own patch of earth.

a 3rd story balcony container garden I put too many hours into

At last, many years and one marriage later, my wife and I own a house in Texas hill country! AND NOW I’M UNSTOPPABLE. Now I begin my inexorable march to grow the most beautiful and culinarily productive garden I can, and I cherish every moment of it.

our new backyard!

So why do you garden? Feel free to comment below :)