Nurture or Nature?

I love gardens. I love the soft petals of flowers bursting with color. I love to watch the ground push forth its bounty in tangles of leaves and stems. I love the smell of freshly tilled earth. I love to stand and pick out seeds – imagining how it might all look as it grows together. I love to stand in the sun and watch the drops of water bounce off of the rinds of melons and cucumbers. I love that you can see progress almost daily.

Gardens take a lot of work. And while I admit to not loving the weeding and the feeding and the waiting, most of the time everything I love about them outweighs the more tedious aspects of bringing a garden to life. I can be a bit lazy with the tending occasionally. Letting the weeds blur the edges of the rows or carefully plotted placement of blooms. But I always wind up out there, working one section at a time to free the plants I love from the ones I don’t.

But once in a great while it’s possible to come across a patch of earth that is barren. No matter how much you water, feed and love it, it simply cannot provide a nurturing place in which seeds can prosper. It’s been worked too much, or been taken over by some other inhospitable force that has rendered it moot when it comes to growing. It needs time to heal and figure out once more how to go about sustaining life.

So what do you do? Do you pour all the love and resources you have into it? Hoping against hope that you can save it? Bring it back from nothingness into the light place where things can grow and prosper once more? Of course you do. And sometimes it works. Sometimes you are able with the right tricks of the trade to turn that earth back into a fertile and loving cradle for life.

But there are times when nothing you do can fix it. Because you didn’t do anything wrong. There just wasn’t life there to begin with. And all the mulch in the world can’t fix that.