My Garden Has Always Gotten Me Through a Crisis. This Pandemic May Be Its Biggest Test

I was born preoccupied with death and disaster, and it's finally turned out to be a useful trait. I always knew there would be a pandemic -- and here it is!

To calm myself down during times of impending (and sometimes imaginary) disaster, I have always gardened, so I have no doubt that in this actual disaster, the feel of dirt will continue to be soothing.

But I hesitate to call what I do gardening. I know who the gardening greats are. I read their books, follow them on Instagram. I know how I should garden.

But I don’t do it that way. Because I don’t want to, and I figure, this is one area of life where I’m not being judged. There’s not a grade or a man’s approval or a paycheck or a contract at stake. I do this only for myself. And I highly recommend that you take the same approach. Thinking you will create a cousin to Piet Oudelft’s High Line or Sissinghurst’s famous white garden will only add to your stress. We’re looking for pleasure here.

I didn’t always think this way. Fifteen years ago, when my husband and I bought a small cottage-like house with four acres in a style-free part of Long Island, I hired a garden designer to create some flower beds around the abandoned-looking pool, which we spiffed up with a new liner and stone coping I copied from an old mansion in Mississippi.

I loved those beds. But over time, as happens, some of the plants died, and some grew too large. The balance was off. I wanted the designer to come back and revive it, but she had moved to Hawaii. I called a few landscape designers, and none of them called me back.

So I gave up -- and that was the best thing I ever did.

I started looking at the plants the way I look at weeds: I don’t want you there, and you are in my way -- or, you’re rather pretty, I think you can stay. I took photos of the beds and at the five garden centers I obsessively haunted, squinted at the plants I liked and tried to picture them in my beds.

I bought what I liked, took them home and set about putting them in place. I would stand back, as if I were painting, and picture the fully formed plant. If it seemed fine, I planted.

Were the beds as “good” as those that preceded them? Probably. Maybe even better. But what was really empowering -- they were mine. I felt a pride of creation, the same way I feel when I cook a good dinner.

A few years ago, when we bought a house in Brookhaven Hamlet, also on Long Island, and rich with style setters and stunning houses, I knew the half-acre property was way beyond my skill set. The beds were mostly mulch, with a few desultory plants set in no discernible pattern, and a few hundred statues and other weird things in the yard that the previous owner had loved and felt were integral to the yard. I hired the landscape designer John Beitel, who created something out of nothing, trees and stone walls and a gravel patio planted with thyme, rosemary and lavender that make me feel like I’m in Provence.

But he left one side of the house to me, building four raised beds which I consider my playpens.

These days, I care more about pollinators, about attracting butterflies and bees. I’m more experimental. I have no plan at all, although one bed is by definition all edible, mostly herbs but also some chard, which anyone can raise and no one can kill. I play with different flowers each year. After following Frances Palmer on Instagram and lusting after her vases, I decided to follow her lead and go big on dahlias, which are foolproof. You put in the bulb around Mother’s Day, and by the end of July you have huge gorgeous flowers.

Yes, it’s nice to have the food and the flowers. I do like walking out the back door and cutting rosemary in the middle of the winter, sage in the fall, and all the summer herbs like basil and thyme.

But it’s not only about the results. If it were, I wouldn't be such a terrible gardener, one who has never made a grid or had her soil tested.

Once it is warm, I leave the house at about seven in the morning in my pajamas with a cup of tea and my phone for podcast listening. I will plan to sit on the patio, but inevitably a weed will catch my eye. I’ll pull it. And then another. And suddenly two hours will pass, and I'm covered with dirt, crawling around in the beds, digging and weeding and planting and listening. When I get tired, I stretch out in the dirt, or on the grass.

In the evening, before dinner, I often head out again, this time in jeans and a long sleeved shirt, so I don’t get all scratched up, and lie down on a beach towel in front of a bed of shrubs and small trees that is overrun. Lying on my side, I call my friends, vodka and lemonade close by, the weeds painlessly disappearing from the bed.

Definitely not a chore.

Originally Appeared on Vogue