By Blake Davis

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“The trouble is, you think you have time.”
— Jack Kornfield

This article is about time.
But isn’t everything, in the end?

As a gardener, I rely so much on tools: hands, hoses, hori-hori knives, carts- But the most effective and most frustrating tool I have is time. The source of both growth and my deepest traumas. 

When my wife and I first looked at the home we now live in, she (a seasoned realtor and appraiser) focused on calculating valuation comps and appreciation projections. I, however, stood in the front yard, pointing to a towering 50-year-old Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) with wild, scraggly limbs and a canopy large enough to hide a secret garden beneath it, saying “You can’t buy time!”

Our children dubbed it The Totoro Tree-a nod to the ancient camphor tree in a beloved classic Japanese children’s film where forest spirits live in a hidden hollow among the roots. 

I’ve never heard flutes or seen a cat-shaped bus emerge from ours, but it does offer wonder, summer fragrance, a buffet for pollinators and perfect climbing branches. 

Since moving in, my four-year-old son has helped me plant more Southern Magnolias in my back yard. “Only” four feet tall, these young trees -just like him- seem like seedlings next to The Totoro Tree. I told him that as he grows, these trees will grow with him, and someday, when they are both much older, he might be able to climb on them. 

What I didn’t say out loud: by that time, his daddy may not be around. 

The Long Shadow of Time

I don’t think I am unique as a gardener in reaching for the earth to work through complex internal issues that I’m not yet able to articulate. Tending my garden I nurture my soul. I turn the soil, pull out stunted or diseased mindsets, examine their roots, and cut back invasive thoughts that block the light from penetrating and energizing the ideas I want to grow. I try to water the perspectives that bring beauty into the world, amending the soil to nourish areas that benefit my family, my community and our future. 

I grew up with a diagnosis that told me I wouldn’t live to see adulthood, so I spent my life like a gardener racing winter – planting fast, building frantically, striving to see something bloom before the frost came. 

But a few years ago, a breakthrough treatment was developed that changed the prognosis.
For the first time, there is a good chance I might live into my 50’s, 60’s or beyond. For me, the last several years have been like watching fall begin to turn, but instead of winter, spring began again. 

Friends ask what that feels like. I’m still digging for the answer.
It’s taking years for my internal clock to recalibrate. Where I once planted with frantic urgency to account for the coming freeze, I’m learning to plant magnolias with the hope I might one day sit beneath them with my son. 

Depth Over Speed

The race against time is still engrained in me. I want fast, tall, brightly blooming plants. I don’t want to wait the years it takes for beneficial natives to establish with minimal blooms, even if their work behind the scenes is vital and deeply rooted.  

Two years ago, I drove to McMinnville, TN (considered the “Nursery Capital of the World”) to buy the largest hydrangeas I could find because I wanted blooms- big and fast.

And they delivered. 

Last week I came home from traveling to find a staggering number of flowers. So abundant and large it’s impossible for me to keep up. My kids and I cut them for neighbors, guests leave with handfuls and delivery drivers drop off packages but leave with cups of flowers in their trucks.
And the blooms just keep coming. 

I love it. I’m also beginning to see this kind of planting differently.
These blooms were bought, not cultivated.

We are gardeners, we know the patience required to tend slow growers. But I’m still learning to trust time. I didn’t understand the impact of slow growth. So, I bought maturity. I rushed the blooms. I shaped the yard to match my urgency. 

A Legacy of Gardening

Last week, sitting in rocking chairs side by side, I told my mother -the writer who taught me everything I know and still ruthlessly wields her red pen on my writings– about this subject I’ve been trying to wrestle into words.

I asked her what gardens she remembered, and how gardening has changed in her nearly 80 years. 

She led me back in time through memories vivid enough to be weeks old: Her maternal grandparents garden in Tallahassee with clear scents of Saint Augustine Grass and Confederate Jasmine. A canopy of forsythia bent low enough to make a magical tunnel connected to her earliest childhood memories. The taste of preserves made from freshly picked figs at her paternal grandparent’s farm in South Georgia. A giant dogwood that stood in her father’s yard with a hidden alcove under its canopy “Much like your Totoro Tree,” she said- where she’d go to hide when her siblings were bickering. 

What brought it all into place for me was her memories when she was a little girl tagging along with her father as he drove throughout South Georgia, visiting the graves of their ancestors and taking cuttings from the plants growing by their headstones.
Those cuttings have passed through time. I clearly remember the bushes lining my grandparent’s walkway- never knowing they came from graveside cuttings. 

The walkway to my grandfather’s house in rural South Georgia, lined by boxwoods- taken from gravesite cuttings 70+ years ago.
In the background are camellia bushes started as cuttings from my great grandmother’s garden in Tallahassee, which, in turn, grew from cuttings taken from her own mother’s garden.
I happened to take this picture when my mother and I were driving through the area roughly 20 years ago, long before I knew the history.

“Gardens today are made to be showcases,” she said. Explaining that in my grandparents and great grandparents’ day they didn’t have places to buy showy, bloom-ready plants grown on fields of landscape fabric, in pots with shallow roots or girdled growth, then shipped in a box truck hundreds of miles to stores and nurseries. 

They took cuttings. From grandparents. From neighbors. From chapels. From family cemeteries planted in grief by long deceased ancestors. They rooted them, let them adapt slowly as they reached into the family soil. They cross-bred plants and named new ones after friends and relatives. She told me there’s a Nelle Demilly camellia in Tallahassee’s Kilearn Gardens named after my great, great grandmother.
They watched over years as the plants became a part of the family’s narrative, rooting generations of gardeners into a story now told to me from a rocking chair on a balmy June afternoon. 

What Am I Leaving Behind?

Modern gardening plays right into my time-based trauma. It rewards fast results and curb appeal.
I know how to pick the biggest plants with the healthiest roots, spread some 10-10-10, automate the watering line and walk away expecting it to thrive, fast-forwarding intimacy, history, story and legacy. 

I don’t believe there’s anything particularly wrong with this in moderation. But I am a Master Gardener. I’m learning to grow more than plants. I’m learning to grow memories. I’m learning to root in relationship. I’m learning to let the yard shape me- planting native seeds that need cold stratification and time. They may never burst with color, but their roots will grow deeper, stronger, benefitting the water, the soil and the ecosystem. Shaping themselves to expand the yard, benefitting those who will come after me, regardless of whether I get to pick and eat the fruit alongside them. 

I want to garden like my great grandparents, like their children. Like my mother did. Personally. Meaningfully. Patiently letting the roots grow alongside the story of my family.

I want my son to learn to wait. I want him to let the space shape him as he grows, crowning towards the light, shyly letting other trees share the sun. Less showy. More rooted. Fully aware. 

He may not remember the conversations with his daddy while planting. But I pray, years from now, he finds himself under the magnolias we planted -the baby Totoro Trees- telling his son about how he used to hide there when his siblings were bickering. 

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be sitting in a rocking chair beside him, still able to remember the smells of the gardenias on my grandfather’s farm in Georgia, or the lilac in my front yard gifted by my wife’s aunt, who took it as a cutting from her great grandfather’s garden. 

After all, we can buy as many trees as we want… but we can’t buy the memories of planting them together. 

This and the first (Magnolia) picture was taken by Sara Kerhoulas (https://www.instagram.com/sara_kerhoulas_photo)

Master Gardener Reflection:

This summer, beyond giving fresh blooms, I’m going to try propagating plants… not to plant in my own yard, but to give away to family, friends and neighbors.

To pass on something rooted in time.
To help someone else turn over their soil.
To grow a memory that can outlive me.

If you want to join me, I don’t have much, but I have some rooting hormone, some perlite, and a slowly growing trust in time, and isn’t that everything a gardener could want?