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Shawna Morrow's avatar

My great grandmother lived to be almost 102, and she vegetable gardened until right around 100. She needed a lot of help from age 93-100, so it was a great opportunity for her great grandchildren to learn from her while helping. I have a lot of beautiful memories of mornings and afternoons spent helping her in her garden. (As an aside, she was absolutely a perfectionist and tried very hard to conform nature to her ideas of perfection. I always chuckled at this - silently, of course.) I think gardening with her taught *me* a lot of patience because of her perfectionism. But I learned so much from her. We bought her house after she couldn’t live there anymore, and we try to keep her flower beds in decent order (and fail because we have 4 kids). We also vegetable garden. I’ve done my own garden since I was in college, and there’s nothing quite like eating the fruits of your labor. And I think having all that knowledge from my great grandmother (and my grandmother, too) has been indispensable. Even if I do things slightly differently than she did.

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TXKeeperCider's avatar

A book I really enjoyed was "The Well Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature" by Sue Stuart-Smith. I wish everyone could know just how pleasurable a garden can be, great or small. To your point about gardening as play, I especially love the chaos of my garden, and the freedom I'm able to give myself to garden as inefficiently and randomly as I wish. A bit of weeding here, a transplant there. It drives my husband crazy but the garden is the one place where I don't feel the need to self-chastise for being so "ADHD."

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