A Garden in Time
A scene from Discovering Wild Places,
Where the Garden Begins
It wasn’t until my father discovered the wild and overgrown remnants of a forgotten garden that he truly became excited about the house.
Sweat on his brow, I found him one day standing between the rhododendron bushes, a cigarette gently hanging from his mouth, smoke trailing past him. Deep in thought, his dark hair standing up on end and his blue eyes shining, he turned to me and pointed. “See that stone wall behind the tall grass? I bet it’s the wall of a garden.”
To me, it looked like a mass of weeds with a few scattered rocks, but I could feel his excitement. His cigarette burned low, his stare fixed on the stone wall. He dropped it underfoot, gave it a slow grind with his boot, and looked back up at me. I stepped closer and said, “I can help. What do we need to do?”
We filled a wheelbarrow with clippers, a shovel, a rake, and an old hand mower and pushed it to the garden’s edge. My father worked with fervor, I could see the endorphins as work, lifting the weight from his shoulders—the kind an old house and six kids an bring. The curve of a smile lit up his face as he carved beauty out of the wilding mess. I remember watching him in awe, thinking how lucky I was to have that time with him.
We clipped, heaved, and tossed piles of overgrowth into the driveway below. Each time we stopped, he’d unroll his cigarette pack from the sleeve of his now soiled white t-shirt. A ritual. A pause. If someone had asked me to describe him in those moments, I’d have said he carried the quiet grace of Robert Mitchum with a mischievous glint like Jack Nicholson.
Once cleared, the garden spoke to us. I imagined it whispering in our ears, You found me. You were the first to notice after all these years. I’ve been waiting. Thank you.
A low stone wall framed the garden beds. Antique roses grew around the edges—tired, like my father, but still holding on.
Those days with my father are still among my most cherished. In a house full of noise and the chaos of six kids, that time together was a rare and unexpected gift. A quiet rhythm of work, rest, and care. A father and daughter, building something beautiful.
I think of him often when I’m in my own garden now—clipping back the overgrown, planting something new, listening for the whisper beneath the leaves. It started there, beside him, with a wheelbarrow, a stone wall, and a tangle of weeds. And it lives on in the gardens I tend today.
