Death

A carpet of petals from dying flowers

Death in a garden is normal. Plants don’t overwinter well. Plants grow old and stop creating flowers, then they stop producing as many leaves, and then they just don’t come up one year. Trees grow so old they topple. Accidents happen. Powerful storms bring things crashing down and crushing everything around them.

Some people even call the winter season a kind of death in the garden.

I say this to say death is normal. As gardeners, we work at different levels of success and effort to hide the death. We deadhead flowers to keep them blooming. We cut down old snags, and we cut back the brown bits.

But death in the garden can be beautiful too. I don’t just mean the seedheads in winter, or the tall brown grasses that sway in the pre-spring winds. There are also the carpets of petals when apple trees drop their blossoms. The flower is done, its time moved on to become an apple, but it is still pretty, even in death, offering something to the garden. When the apples themselves are done, some broken on the ground by windfall, they can be beautiful: shining red and green. But then they will rot and feed the soil, feed the squirrels and birds.

Death in a garden is something we need to grow accustomed to and something we need to learn how to deal with, and something we need to decide how much we want to hide.

Life is filled with death. Friends, family, even one day, yours.

A garden is also filled with death. In the garden, death is not the end. It is a gesture toward what comes next: compost, seed, silence, bloom.

The more time I spend with plants, the more I learn not every loss must be mourned. Sometimes it’s just the way the future makes room for itself.

Maybe the real question isn’t how to stop death in your garden, or how not to be afraid of a little brown at the edges, but how to keep living with it and let it teach us something gentle about our own seasons.

Tend your garden. Help others tend theirs.