Ever since we bought our first house and planted those first veggies in the inherited raised beds, I have been fully betrothed to gardening. Geezus those plants! If you give them a full and real moment, they give you back riches. Listen to the tall grass and you’ll hear Mother Nature breathe. Watch a bee fly from plant to plant and you are witnessing millions of years of evolution. Smell a Lilac and feel your heart flutter like butterfly wings. Bite into a perfectly ripe sun-baked strawberry, and you will know heaven. Sometimes it feels like an addiction, but its really just the soul clawing it’s way back to nature.

I often say gardening is the only hobby that I’ve ever stuck with. Really, the plants have taken me hostage and I’m not complaining. Since those first veggies…

…I have experienced the too frequent, nail-biting anxiety of standing in line at the garden center wondering how much my plant purchases will tally up to while simultaneously convincing myself “it’s an investment.”

…I have learned so much about gardening to understand how little I will always know.

…Gardener’s World on BBC is my Master Gardener Program.

…Creating the Middle Garden, and my previous garden, have been avenues to foster good in this world. These gardens are where the plants, and critters, and fungi, and soil habitats can come to thrive in a world where everything is being taken from them.

…I have become aware that I want a garden that is so bursting at the seams with plants that I must always be giving away plants.

…even if that never happens, I still want to give away plants.

…I want to share all I learn and know to a community who can relate to all this. And I want to continue learning and growing with that community. Right now, I can count all the gardeners I know on one hand, and one of them is my mom. And another is my friend’s mom. Where are the rest of us?

…A single garden won’t make a difference. But what if we all make a garden? We’d transform the world. Let’s do it together.