I Went Inside to Make Art and the Garden Seized Power

At some point this summer, I abandoned the garden. Not officially. There was no ceremony. No tiny clipboard handed over to the rabbits. No formal announcement to the tomatoes that management would be stepping away from daily operations. I just got busy.

One minute I was outside worrying about peppers and tying up tomatoes and trying to determine whether the butternut squash vines were “spreading enthusiastically” or actively annexing the front yard. The next minute I was inside asking questions like, “Does this moth need to be 10% smaller?” and “Will this navy blue survive printing?” and “Should the bee seal be slightly more luminous?” This is how empires fall.

The Etsy shop has become, very unexpectedly, A Thing. A real thing. There are orders. There are prints. There are notecards. There are clear-window boxes and rigid mailers and bee seals and paper samples and people buying moonlit botanical art for their actual homes. There are apparently people out there who would like to live among enormous moths, black birds, night-blooming flowers, antique gold frames, and moons large enough to affect local tides. These are my people.

Unfortunately, while I have been indoors building a small nocturnal paper kingdom, the real botanical kingdom outside has noticed the power vacuum. The garden is now self-governing. The squash has established territorial claims. There is kale growing voluntarily in places where kale was never planted, which I respect because at least one of us has initiative. The rabbits, squirrels, and cardinals have continued their longstanding policy of viewing anything I plant as a charitable food program. The tomatoes are producing mysterious quantities of green fruit while refusing to answer questions about timelines. Somewhere out there, I assume, a zucchini is becoming the size of the neighbor’s dachshund. I no longer know. I have become an absentee landlord.

The strange part is that I am still, technically, spending all day in a garden. Just not the real one. Instead, I am moving flowers three pixels to the left. I am giving ravens moons. I am placing iridescent beetles under glass cloches like tiny Victorian dignitaries. I am adjusting the shadows behind imaginary cactus flowers so they do not disappear when printed on cotton paper. At one point this week, I spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about whether a fossil in the lower-right corner of a piece looked sufficiently fossil-like. Meanwhile, outside, there is almost certainly an actual insect eating something I paid money for.

I find this very funny. There is something deeply absurd about neglecting your real foliage because you are too busy perfecting imaginary foliage. And yet, I don’t actually feel that guilty about it. Gardens are surprisingly good at reminding you that your participation has always been somewhat optional.

We like to imagine ourselves as directors. We make plans. We make diagrams. We order seeds in January with the confidence of military strategists. This tomato will go here. The beans will climb this. The squash will remain politely in its designated area. Then August arrives and the garden says, “That’s adorable.”

By late summer, the plants have stopped consulting you. The vines go where they want. The flowers lean into each other. The weeds discover structural engineering. The wildlife moves in. Everything becomes tangled and slightly lawless. Which, if I’m being fair, is when I usually like the garden best anyway.

A perfectly managed garden always feels a little alarming to me. I want something escaping. I want a plant growing through another plant. I want a sunflower that has turned away from the house entirely, as though offended. I want evidence that nature has been conducting unauthorized experiments after dark.

So perhaps this is not abandonment. Perhaps I have simply entered the observational phase. I go outside occasionally now to survey what has happened in my absence. I make a small noise. I move one vine. I pull one weed so the neighbors understand that an adult still technically lives here. Then I go back inside because the outdoors is currently hot and humid and it feels like I’m in a giant’s mouth.

There are orders to pack. There are moons to adjust. There is a moth somewhere on my computer that may or may not need to be 5% brighter. The garden will survive without me. In fact, I suspect it may prefer the arrangement.

For now, the squash can have the yard. I have a small nocturnal empire to run.

-G