If you've ever seen a garden, chances are good during your visit that you've paid the most attention to the glorious and colorful blooms, plants, and shrubs. Chances are good you didn't come to the garden looking for intruders like weeds and pests. Master Gardeners spend a fair amount of time planning what to plant along with ways to keep intruders out, or at least at bay.
And chances are good that during your visit, you aren't thinking about all the minds and hands behind the scenes who helped bring the garden to the point of taking your breath away.
I am not a Master Gardener. Not in the traditional sense of that term. My paternal grandmother was and her gardens were so sumptuous, they were part of the annual garden tour each summer in her town.
I loved looking at the flowers she grew. I loved watching the bees buzzing from one bloom to the next. I loved plucking the tiny concord grapes growing alongside the barn right from their vine, whose tartness caused my nose to sweat when I ate a handful.
I loved picking crab apples from the tree that grew next to the makeshift basketball court on the driveway’s blacktop, then bringing them into the kitchen where Granny would transform them into crab apple jelly whose pink translucence shimmered in the jars like the inside of a conch shell.
(Crab apple jelly remains a favorite today. Whenever I find a vendor who sells homemade crabapple jelly at a local farmers market, I buy at least two jars.)
The birds will get some of the seeds
Life is often compared to a garden, rich with growth and blooming seasons alongside times of dormancy and rejuvenation.
Growth can be abundant, and external events can bring catastrophe, wiping out in a matter of minutes, months, even years meticulous work. Some years crops are bountiful. Others leave much to the imagination.
Still, life moves along and you are right there, moving along with it.
At some point, you learn your garden looks the way it does because of how you think.
If it's full of weeds, that's on you.
Gone to seed?
On you, too.
The soil waits to be nourished and tilled. The seeds of your dreams await planting. Once in the ground, some will take root, while others won't. Some seeds will blow away. Some were never meant to incubate, let alone flourish.
And the birds will get some of the seeds.
The gardens at Versailles
None of these variables should impede your progress toward creating the garden of your life in the way you most want. You aren't required to plant the same seeds as those who came before you. Not unless you want to. My mom planted seeds throughout her life that look nothing like the seeds I've planted, and still want to plant.
After our daily morning conversation, she often marvels at the way my brain thinks, how I see the world so differently than she does. I marvel, in turn, at the life she led, the seeds she planted, and what grew out of those seeds. At one time when I was younger, I blindly followed the model of gardening she and my dad showed me, only to discover I was growing the wrong garden.
They planted pumpkins.
I wanted roses.
As a New Year commences, I find myself once again reflecting on the previous 12 months, thinking about the seeds I want to plant. I'm at a point in my life where I want to grow plants I've never grown. I'm at a point in my life where I want to grow a garden I've never grown. Even though I have previous experience planting seeds and growing things, I don't know what I'm doing with the seeds I have in front of me. Growing them effectively will take a new set of skills, not to mention a complete paradigm shift.
I don't want just one rose bush.
I want the gardens at Versailles.
Planting the seeds of your dreams
If personal development thought leaders of the past 100 years are correct -- people like Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, Bob Proctor and Tony Robbins -- the desire for my life to be the gardens at Versailles is where making that come true begins.
It's not enough to want the gardens at Versailles.
Now the work comes into play, including finding allies and guides who can help.
Those thought leaders teach and prove, through example, that big dreams and quantum leaps aren't impossible. In fact, the opposite is true.
But they don't come into bloom just because you have the dream.
The dream is where it starts.
Now you must do what a seed requires for it to become that garden.
I can't predict if I'll have the gardens at Versailles, or if my life will transform monumentally in the coming year.
What I do know is I have the dream.
I have the desire.
And I imagine the gardens at Versailles in exquisite detail.
Let the work begin.
