Plants Bring Peace

Plants bring me peace. While growing scientific evidence affirms this, it is a truth I have always grasped with my heart not my mind.

My earliest gardening memories are a blur of color and fragrance. I picture my grandmother’s magical backyard bursting at Eastertime with white and pink dogwood and pastel azaleas. I see my three-year-old self happily watering a backyard patch of orange calendulas. I recall the intoxicating scent of lilacs drawing me to clamber up a stack of peat moss bales to sniff the lavender blossoms. I even tried to make lilac-scented lotion by crushing the flowers into a dish of my mother’s hand lotion.

My early gardening efforts were clumsy. My first potted plant in college was an ornamental pepper. I loved the miniature yellow and red peppers glowing like Christmas lights. But one afternoon after plucking off the shriveled peppers, I rubbed my eye. I never made that mistake again. As a graduate student, I tried to force a Christmas cactus to bloom by painstakingly controlling its daily light exposure. After several weeks’ effort, I forgetfully turned on the oven where I was stashing the plant for its dark periods. I opened the door to see a limp brown plant and melted pot.

Yet other plants have bloomed for me with sheer grace. On my kitchen windowsill are five small potted orchids. I do almost nothing for them, yet they bless me year after year, sending out swelling flower stems that will bloom throughout the dark winter.

Wherever we go, we try to visit a botanical garden. One of my favorites is Kew Gardens in south London. We happily toured their huge Victorian glass houses enclosing
volkswagen-sized lily pads and a more than 250-year old giant cycad, the oldest potted plant in the world.

In the summer of 2020, amid multiple pandemic-wrought stresses, I set off for a brief break. At my hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, a sandwich board planted in the lobby helpfully pointed guests toward the few attractions still open. Chief among these was Olbrich Gardens, a free botanical garden. I reveled in the richly planted garden ‘rooms’ leading one onto another. I lingered in front of a pink lotus flower animated by blue dragonflies which floated in a reflecting pool overlooking Lake Monona. In the heart of the grounds stood a spectacular golden royal Thai pavilion, a gift from alumni and the Thai government to the University of Wisconsin. Sumptuous flowers and foliage surrounded the richly carved and gilded pavilion. Fellow visitors moved slowly among the flowerbeds as if to savor each plant, gaining from the garden all the more, I believe, because of all else which had been lost.

My husband and I enjoy watching episodes of the British television program Gardeners’ World. The more than 55-year old program, sagely hosted by the gardening writer Monty Don, is a national institution in England. As the pandemic lockdowns tightened, the BBC committed to keep filming this show as an essential public service, even as live camera operators were replaced by remotely-operated cameras at Monty Don’s garden estate, Longmeadow. The show also began featuring video clips submitted by viewers. I love these keyhole glimpses into their treasured sanctuaries.

If I ever were able to add a dream room to my house, it would not be a home theater, gym, or wine cellar. It would be an airy, glass-walled garden room featuring a huge saltwater aquarium of vivid tropical fish bounded by an indoor waterfall tumbling over boulders into a gentle stream burbling around its perimeter. The room would be filled with palm trees, bookshelves, red anthuriums, orchids, and bromeliads.

Today we have a perennial  bed along our front path, and we plant a flower pot garden on our deck each summer. Each year I rush to garden inside the narrow window between the last spring frost and the first fall frost. Each year I spend way too much at the garden center. Each year I am dealt infuriating losses by savvy deer and rabbits. Budding tulips are severed and maturing gladioli are scythed off overnight. If I had a night vision camera stationed outside, I’m sure it would record a gang of four-legged visitors partying and noshing on my flowers.

Also each year I am rewarded by the joyful surprise of ‘volunteer’ flowers– maybe a self-seeded scarlet oriental poppy or a saffron yellow California poppy, or a powder blue forget-me-not. I press chickpea-sized nasturtium seeds into the soil and marvel as they sprout and cascade across the path like a tipped stack of green plates garnished with edible vermilion flowers. I cherish any flower that thrives in my windy, hilltop garden, such as sapphire delphinium or fragrant peonies, climbing mauve passionflowers, candy-striped petunias, honey-scented sweet alyssum, or neon red begonias.

And I delight in seeing birds and bees and butterflies take nourishment from my flowers. I see a monarch butterfly alight on a tall stem of electric purple Verbena bonariensis. From inches away, I watch his stained glass wings slowly flap as he uncoils his proboscis in and out of each pin-sized flower. I wish him well, imagining him decamping soon to mysterious wintering grounds in the high Mexico forest. I sit on my deck chair and sense the infrasonic buzz of a hummingbird’s wings as he zooms toward the potted red hibiscus. Patiently he darts from flower to flower, angling his blurred wings this way and that before finally zipping upward to hover just feet from me. He looks at me quizzically, I am sure, then sails off to rest for a rare still moment in a high tree branch.

I watch bumble bees stiffly crash into the red hollyhocks, collecting sticky pollen on their flanks, while droning honeybees clamber over the pink sedum heads, colliding like yellow-dusted bumper cars.

I am at peace.

Copyright © 2024 by Andrea Kahler Robertson