At our first Garden Circle this week, I asked a simple question:
What does your garden teach you?
I didn’t know what people would say. I expected a range of answers. Maybe something about growth, or creativity, or even failure. But almost every woman, in her own way, said the same thing: Patience.
It landed differently than I expected. Not as a nice idea, not as something poetic, but as something very real, and very present. Because this week, patience wasn’t optional.
All week, I’ve been waiting to plant. Back in February, I started perennial flowers. I’ve been tending them for months; adjusting light, watering carefully, hardening them off, moving them outside.
They’re ready, I’m ready. And still, they just sat outside, waiting. Because the weather turned. Rain, cold, even a little bit of snow here in Emmett. The kind of weather that keeps you from doing the exact thing you’ve been working toward for months.
Every day, I kept looking out, thinking, maybe today. And every day, the garden answered back the same way: Not yet.
Sitting in that circle, hearing everyone say “patience,” I realized something: We don’t usually choose patience, we get placed into it.
You can do everything right in a garden; start seeds on time: care for them well, plan your beds and still, you don’t get to decide when things move forward.
The conditions have to be right.
The soil has to be ready and the timing has to line up and if you push it? You usually find out later that the garden was right.
This is the part no one really talks about, the in-between. The stretch where everything is prepared, but nothing is happening yet. It can feel like you’re behind. But when you actually sit with other gardeners and hear what’s really going on, you realize:
Everyone is in some version of this; seeds that didn’t take, plants that are stalled, plans that are waiting on weather. No one’s garden is moving in a straight line.
And somehow, talking to others about their gardens changes things. Patience stops feeling like something you’re failing at and starts feeling like part of the process.
This week, instead of planting, I waited.
I walked the garden without changing anything, I checked the soil without trying to fix it and let things stay unfinished.
Certainly not because I wanted to but because there wasn’t another option; and maybe that’s what the garden teaches best.
Not how to grow faster or how to get it right but how to stay with something when it’s not moving yet.
The weather will shift, the ground will warm, the planting will happen-it always does.
If this is where you are right now
If your garden feels like it’s paused…if you’re waiting on timing, or weather, or the next step…you’re not off track.
This is part of it.
Come sit with us
The Garden Circles are where these kinds of conversations happen. Not as advice or instruction, but as a place to actually say what’s going on and hear that you’re not the only one in it.
If that’s something you’ve been looking for, you’re welcome to join us.
Or stay connected through the Garden Society
If you want to follow along as this season unfolds, the Garden Society is where I share:
Weekly garden reflections
Monthly online gatherings
What I’m experimenting with in real time
The question was simple: What does your garden teach you?
This week, the answer was patience, not the kind you choose…the kind you learn by living it.
-Ashley