All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens. OLIVER SACKS
A warm welcome to my new subscribers — thank you for joining Swimming at Altitude. For those who have no clue who I am, I’m still figuring that out myself, and though I am shy about labels, I’ll give you a few. I’m an artist, designer, and writer living in the Colorado Rockies, navigating life without our daughter Bailey, trying to find some sort of equilibrium again. I am trying to cherish what remains after this cataclysmic loss, looking for beauty now more than ever.
Colorado mud season is aptly named since the receding April snow reveals a brown, gray, and muddy landscape. So my husband and I decided to opt out of our least favorite time of year here and hit the road.
Our first stop? Savannah, Georgia. I’d never been to Savannah, a city that’s burned bright in my imagination since John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil became a runaway bestseller and movie. We stayed with our friends the Bents, guffawed like teenagers, played cutthroat games of Oh Hell with their large and loving family, and ate an astonishing amount of food. Really, really good food. It was lovely to have an additional thirty-five degrees deposited on my skin and bones, to stroll block after block smelling jasmine and see the emerging magnolia blossoms. We walked under oak tree limbs festooned with Spanish moss and toured Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, where she read for hours in the family bathtub overlooking a pocket-sized yard filled with her beloved chickens. We also took a break from the news, where each fresh headline lunges at us like a demonic, leering jack-in-the-box with no end to the jump scares in sight. I have been mourning in double time — both for our daughter and for our country and its place in the world. It was nice to set aside my angst for this planet for a few days.
outside of the O’Connor family home
We are now home to an early spring in the Rockies, and I’m back in the garden. This land is dear to me, the place where we reared our daughters—one now in Peru and one in the stars—and nurturing the gardens is critical to my mental health.
Each growing season is different, but the charge of adrenaline, the promise of growth and green, never wavers. And every year I’m reminded about the solace in building a sanctuary and in courting inspiration. I learn planning and patience, how to take failure in stride while understanding color and composition on a larger scale. I’ve learned to document the subtle and dramatic changes in the weather, wildlife patterns, and soil, all noticeably impacted by our changing climate.
the sunflower plot and the Elk Mountain Range
A few years ago, a fellow gardener and friend came to visit from the East Coast. It’s always fun to welcome a fellow horticulture enthusiast into the Mojo Gardens (named for our late great dog Mojo) and talk about garden schemes: large scale composting, an expanding xeriscape garden, snug fence construction to encourage pollinators, water-efficient hedgerows and tree well designs, the dynamics of our large potager garden, and other homespun engineering projects.
During my friend’s visit, I urged her to tour the local art museum, specifically a small installation of the eco-artist Paula Hayes. My friend brought back the accompanying catalogue on the exhibit and read this excerpt aloud:“Hayes creates ‘living artworks’ resembling biomorphic forms that are ever changing and evolving.”
courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Biomorphic? Who says biomorphic? Isn’t that what we do?” she quipped. And then she asked why all serious gardeners aren’t considered eco-artists. She pointed out that gardeners have a singular relationship to the environment. For example, the Garden Club of America has a conservative reputation, yet its lobbying arm is focused on conservation education. How fluid are the boundaries between gardener and consciousness-raiser/artist? When can you lay claim to advocacy as well? Good questions, all. We had no idea.
I googled gardeners and eco-artists and found some interesting rabbit holes and celebration of the genre’s stars, like Andy Goldsworthy and Ana Mendieta, but no definitive answers. Gardening gets tucked into that purgatory of creative outpour where the sorting of how one process gets ordained to a higher order, in this instance from “mere” gardening to creating eco-art, is entirely up to the whim of the very few who opine publicly about such things. Defining what qualifies as “art” is more baffling than ever and subject to expanding contradictions. It doesn’t help that many art critics and some artists use byzantine rhetoric to describe the creative process. Sometimes reading an artist's statement or art review feels like a caricature of good communication and writing, ensuring a climate of obfuscation and exclusivity. And so much comes down to branding. If you position yourself a certain way, then you can be validated and resurrected into any shape you desire.
indoor and outdoor daffodils
Here is what I do know: keeping a simple kitchen garden and supporting sustainable agriculture further binds us to the planet. So does growing flowers and other pollinators. All gardens, humble and celebrated alike, inspire us. Monet’s garden was and still is a feedback loop of inspiration and creation. Eudora Welty considered her gardening life an integral part of her writing life. Wendell Berry finds a reprieve from melancholy in the lush surroundings of his native Kentucky and poetry from his sense of place. Jamaica Kincaid’s garden fortifies her prose. Although I identify as a gardener, I have no “training” in garden design. I learn as I go, and there is a constant tug of wonder while I tend my flock. Gardening puts me in a flow state, where I problem-solve and spin more ideas. As for the inhabitants of the Mojo Gardens -- they don’t care what I call myself -- gardener, artist, writer, laborer, eco-artist -- as long as I get back to work.
Listening and Reading
Need a good listen while doing the more tedious garden chores?
Jennifer Jewell's Cultivating Place
Alexis Nikole — watching her is a delight, but I also listen to her when I don’t have time to view her reels.
And in celebration of Spring, I read Wintering, Katherine May's memoir and reflections on winter and the importance of honoring our need to retreat from the world from time to time. So a very timely read for me, and one I strongly recommend...