Many people take a gardener’s work for granted. They shouldn’t! Here are twelve of the important roles a gardener plays….

First, a gardener is a laborer.

You work, lift, haul, dig, sow, reap. You eat bugs and dirt and pain and sweat and cold. You love the outdoors, sun, water, and the feel and smell of dirt.

You turn to your garden to create, not to consume. You know that work is the one prayer that most deserves to be answered. You feed the hungry. Your work is sensuous and sensual, and you find joy in its direct experience. You are close to the soil and fully connected to the earth. You are here, now. Your work is love made visible.

A gardener is a good neighbor.

You’re a giver—of bouquets, bulbs, jam and apples, of cucumbers and conversation and kindness, of assistance and advice. You’re a teacher of both the old and the young. You know that a single seed in a paper cup holds a world of science and wonder.

You’re prepared to pass on a whole lifetime of gardening traditions—in times of prosperity, or in times of disaster. You decorate your community. You spread beauty and knowledge.

A gardener is a horticulturist.

You’re a student of plants, a botanist, a collector, a taxonomist, a geneticist, a specialist. In order to care for your plants, you study their whole world. You understand losses and surprises, setbacks and triumphs, persistence and patience.

A gardener is a scientist.

You enter your garden not to escape reality but to observe it more closely. You compare. You take notes, keep records, write journals. You analyze your failures and improve on your successes. You inquire and experiment and expand your knowledge.

A gardener is a naturalist.

Your expertise is not only in plants. You know soils, weather, birds, insects, fungi, microorganisms and micronutrients, pathogens, pollution, and pesticides. You recognize your biological reflection, your genetic double, in every garden creature and plant.

You celebrate the messiness of evolution and sex and spring and birth and rebirth. You’re an ecologist, a biologist, a zoologist. You know the connectedness of creation and your place in the web of life.

A gardener is an activist.

Your garden shows that you care—about healthful food, clean air and water, and earth-friendly horticultural practices; about soil conservation, wildlife habitat, about smaller and larger ecosystems, about native plants and species extinction.

You understand that the one power you have that will never corrupt you is your power to make something lovely. You’re a bioethicist, a political animal, and a steward of our children’s future.

Your garden is a statement of how you relate—to the land, to family, neighbors, community, to the present, past and future, to your country and to other countries, to your planet. You found out, in your garden, who you are and who you want to be, what you stand for.

A gardener is a creative artist.

You nurture the beauty in each plant. Your garden is an expression of your individual style, your philosophy, personality, your personal rules and directions and themes, your knowledge base, experiences, and interests. Through your garden, you give form to chaos.

You paint picturesque garden compositions. You demonstrate that substances obeying their own laws do beautiful things, and you demonstrate that there is no beauty anywhere that is not totally dependent on relationship. You co-create living masterpieces.

A gardener is a traveler on a mythic journey.

You venture through a beckoning gate into a mysterious world of uncharted paths, on a timeless hero’s journey through secret passages and hidden turnings, to your life’s destinations….You sometimes stop to smell the roses, and maybe slay a dragon(fly) or two.

A gardener is a philosopher.

A garden is a philosopher’s church, a place to worship Mother Nature and the mysterious workings of the universe. In a garden, you seek, find and create meaning.

In your life, as in your garden, your purposes and interests and opportunities change with the seasons. In your life, as in your garden, you live and make choices within a limited framework, with considerable constraints, making the most of what you have, and working what is already there. In your garden, you see reflected your own birth, reproductive urges, decay and death, your battles with disease and disorder, your struggles to grow, to compete, to seek light.

Along with your garden plants, you share the tender mercies of rain and sun and nourishment. You dance a ring around your rosies, your pockets full of posies. You come from dust, to dust return. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

A gardener is an historian and a storyteller.

Your garden tells, not only your story, but its own story—how you made it, what your plans and impulses were. Your garden reveals all the things you can’t resist doing and all the things you never got around to.

Perhaps your garden tells the history of the land itself—its geology, topography, its last owners and previous uses. Your garden may reflect memories of beloved childhood gardens, as well as gardens you’ve visited in your travels, through art, literature, and in your imagination.

Last, a gardener is a mystic.

In your garden, you can be a dreamer, a spiritual seeker, maybe even a monk. In a garden, you accept life’s mystery, and attempt to recreate it.

You accept God’s grace, and his fierce, unexplainable logic. In a garden, you know God, for by the work, you know the Workman. Your work is your worship, gratitude, communion, and offering. You live in that infinite time, space, and distance that is the present.

Your smallest flower contains a universe. You are that flower, and you are the universe. You are the gardener and the garden, the fruit of the vine and the harvest.

(Thanks for insights, inspiration and images to: Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life; Michael Pollan, Second Nature; Joe Eck, Elements of Garden Design; Ed Whitney (watercolorist); Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman and One Man’s Garden; Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet; The Holy Bible; and Mother Goose.)