Finding salvation in seed-starting
On beginning a garden again, despite uncertainty
What’s the point
if you’re not going to take care of what’s yours
to take care of? My spouse flicks dog shit
into the woods with a stick, kicks stray river rocks
back to the bank, picks up a lone glove
and places it on the trail sign. Our twins were
meant to stay inside my womb for three
more months, at least one or two. Yesterday
my nephew asks how tiny they were, imagining
what he could not see. Today my spouse snaps-
off low hanging twigs, tosses them towards
tomorrow. We were each going to carry a child
on our shoulders, dip low through snowy rhododendron,
stand on the edge of streams looking
for salamanders in the Spring.
When your energy has been inclined towards the protection of someone you can no longer protect, the growth of someone who is no longer growing in the same way that they were, where does it go? Energy cannot be either created or destroyed. Like plants and bodies returned to the earth, energy simply changes form.
When I lost my daughter-to-be last year in late pregnancy, some of that energy became ashes. We picked them up in a hailstorm, pelted with water that had seemingly turned to stone.
Some of that energy lingered. It seemed to be waiting for a job to do.
I know that many people who have lost someone important feel this. That there needs to be a physical ritual to mark where a person's life-fire has become ashes—something to do.
It also feels like there needs to be a place where the spirit, that un-weighable part of the whole, can linger, or leave a mark.
It feels like those of us that are left are duty bound to make that place, or that mark. To signpost the threshold where our lost ones stepped through the door.
A plant, or a garden, sometimes seems like a logical choice. A place for ashes, and for remembering.
But it can be hard to know what to grow, or where, or how. Particularly if you're somebody who very much wants to see something like a tree go into the ground to mark the passing of a loved one, but it's been hard to grow things before. “Plant a tree” becomes just another daunting task on your list of daunting post-loss tasks. The work of memorializing becomes something else that you're meant to carry, something impossibly heavy.
I've seen so many grieving people, particularly birthing parents who have also gone through a physical loss that is deeply depleting for the body, get really stuck here. They feel unable to carry that burden for good reason: because what they need is something to carry them, out of that dark place, as real rituals are meant to do.
A ritual doesn’t have to be fancy. We started small. We started by watching the light. And then, in time, we began to talk about seeds.
It’s long been a beautiful tradition for my husband and me to flip through the seed catalogs that start arriving in the darkest winter months, and to show each other all the exciting things we’d like to try in the coming year.
“We could grow a purple carrot!” we’d say, wonderingly, to each other, against the backdrop of bare brown branches and ice-marbled soil, the notion of color a distant memory.
After we lost our daughter, whom we named Saule, after the Lithunian goddess of the sun, we thought: “Maybe this year, we can grow a bright red sunflower.”
That thought – a single blazing sunflower – became the thing that carried us, from our loss date to our due date and beyond. Growing a sunflower from seed, and creating a place for it in the ground, became the ritual.
Seeds are beautifully inexpensive. Ordering a packet of sunflower seeds is not like starting a nonprofit or a foundation in the name of your beloved lost one. Seeds are have-able dreams that anyone can have in springtime, even if all you have to offer them is one sunny windowsill.
It takes a while for seeds to ship, so some people start in January or February if they’re ordering from catalogs, like us. But you can also pop down to your local garden store and pick something out on impulse. The Spring Solstice, which arrives this week, is as good a time as any to begin.
What then? You can start a handful of seeds in a egg carton, with a bit of everyday potting soil, keep them on a warm windowsill, and water them just a bit each day with a spray bottle.
By the time the last frost has passed, sometime in mid-May, when things are looking brighter, you’ll hopefully have a few brave seedlings, the start of something sweet to put into the ground. Something to mark the place where the spirit of your lost love can linger. Or where you can go to meet your new future halfway.
I will warn: It is also possible that you won’t have seedlings. Tiny shoots can frizzle if left too long in the sun, or wilt if too long submerged under water. It is very hard when this happens. Harder still when you’re growing them to move through grief and back into life again. And yet trying again, with seeds, is not so hard as trying again at other things. This is a comfort.
I’ll be talking more about the art and risk of seed-starting in my upcoming workshop this Thursday (info below). But in the meantime, if you’d like some suggestions for actual, literal seed-buying for the Solstice, see the NOTES.
NOTES:
My husband is partial to the Seed Savers catalog for interesting heirloom seeds. It’s hard to resist a lineup of seeds that are all survivors, in a way. They tend to have good success rates in our Northeastern garden (zone 7a). I’ll be trying delicata squash again with their seeds this year after trying unsuccessfully to get them going last year.
Another local (NY) catalog we love is Hudson Valley Seed Co. I’ve always had good luck with their nasturtium and Scarlet Emperor runner bean seeds in particular, which are large, easy to handle, and quick-growing (I’ve used them for years in kids’ gardening classes for this reason). Nasturtiums, sunflowers and marigolds are particularly easy to grow, and help to repel bugs from other plants.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds is a lovely catalog to have on your coffee table as well. They’re good for finding unusual varieties of common vegetables (i.e. purple carrots), and as a reference for recipes and teas you can make with the more common things you’re already growing.
Gardeners.com is a good gear resource for things like seed trays (if you’d prefer that to a recycled egg carton) and urban gardening supplies (like this elevated planter for balconies that makes me miss our NYC apartment).
Still not sure?
wrote a lovely piece this week in about “committing to the asparagus’ – that is, planting something rather than nothing now, even if the future seems uncertain. (H/T to for this one!)The poem above was written by the amazing Rev. Molly Bolton, who teaches beautiful workshops on poetry and grief with RTZhope.org, which is also hosting my workshop above. Molly (she/they) lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Boone, North Carolina. They write weekly for enfleshed and have poems published or forthcoming in Susurrus, EcoTheo, Bearings Collegeville, and Prayers and Blessings for Healthcare Workers (Morehouse Press). You can find more of Molly’s work on Instagram @mjbolton.
Lovely—thank you 🙏🏻
What a beautiful name for your daughter Ryan.
We have a passion flower that amazes us every year - it now spreads the length of our fence and isn’t even in the ground - it’s in a wooden planter and proves us wrong every summer! The flowers are stunning, so intricate I feel like I’m looking at a secret of the universe!