A project could begin on a computer and still end with you hunched over a cutting mat at midnight, metal ruler in one hand and a very sharp blade in the other. Which is how I once cut my finger during graphic design class.

This was not unusual. Art school involved a surprising number of sharp objects for a place theoretically devoted to creativity. X-acto knives, mat cutters, utility blades, needles, wire, metal rulers with edges capable of taking a small personal grievance against you. You learned very quickly that “studio practice” sometimes meant “try not to bleed on the Bristol board.”

So there I was, having just sliced my finger open while working on a project, when my professor looked over and asked the obvious question.

“Did you get blood on your piece?”

Not: Are you okay? Not: Do you need a Band-Aid? Not even: How much blood are we talking about here?

Did you get blood on your piece?

And the terrible part is that this made perfect sense to me. My finger would heal. The project was due.

This, more or less, is what art school taught me about priorities.

I also once super glued my fingertips together, which is another thing art school somehow made feel less like a medical concern and more like an inconvenience in the production schedule. There is a very specific kind of dignity lost when you are standing over a project, fingers partially fused, trying to decide whether you can still hold a ruler.

Art school taught me that there are emergencies, and then there are actual emergencies. A minor flesh wound is unfortunate. Accidentally mounting your final piece crooked fifteen minutes before critique is a catastrophe from which civilization may never recover.

It taught me that glue behaves differently when you are already late. It taught me that printers can smell fear. This was especially true in the late 1990s, when the computer lab still felt faintly experimental. Files vanished. Fonts disappeared. Printers developed deeply personal objections to whatever you were trying to print. You could spend hours making something look perfect on screen, only to discover that the printer had its own creative vision.

The future had arrived. The future was temperamental. And the future still expected you to know how to cut a perfectly straight edge with a knife.

It taught me that the moment you decide, “I’ll just make one tiny adjustment,” you have entered a dangerous and lawless country from which many promising projects never return. It taught me that the piece you spent three weeks lovingly making will inevitably attract less attention than the thing you threw together at 2 a.m. because your original idea failed spectacularly. This remains one of the universe’s more irritating creative laws.

It also taught me that nobody cares how long something took if it doesn’t work.

This one hurt.

You could spend forty hours on a design, carefully adjusting type, composition, color, spacing, texture, and every other microscopic thing that seemed desperately important at 1:17 in the morning. Then critique day would arrive, everyone would pin their work to the wall, and someone would squint at yours and say, “I’m not sure I understand what I’m supposed to look at first.”

Forty hours. Reduced to one squint.

But that was the lesson. Effort and effectiveness are not the same thing. Art school was very good at teaching this in ways that bordered on emotional violence.

It also taught me to stop treating everything as precious. Paper can be replaced. Ideas can be redone. You can start over. You can cut something apart and rearrange it. You can paint over it. You can throw the whole miserable thing in the trash, go get coffee, and discover the next morning that the world has somehow continued turning.

This may actually have been the most useful lesson, because before that, I tended to believe that if I had invested enough time in something, I was obligated to keep saving it. Art school cured me of that. Sometimes the answer is not another hour of tinkering. Sometimes the answer is scissors.

There was also critique, which taught an entirely different set of priorities. You learned that criticism of the work is not criticism of your existence, even when it feels suspiciously similar at first. You learned to listen for the useful thing buried beneath somebody’s terrible wording. You learned that ten people can have ten different opinions and you still have to decide which one matters.

You learned that “I don’t like it” is not especially useful feedback, while “I don’t know where my eye is supposed to go” probably is. And eventually you learned that defending every choice is exhausting. Sometimes someone points out a problem and the correct response is simply: “Yep.”

There is great freedom in “Yep.”

Years later, I still think about that professor asking whether I had bled on my project. It was objectively ridiculous. It was also, in its own peculiar way, completely practical. The finger was going to be fine. The deadline remained unmoved.

After surviving all that, I did what any reasonable person would do and chose a profession famous for its calm, orderly atmosphere: teaching.

I didn’t stay in graphic design professionally, but I don’t think I ever really left it either. I still notice spacing. I still care about type. I still distrust printers. I still know that “one tiny adjustment” is almost never one tiny adjustment. And I still think that one of the most useful things art school taught me was how to decide what actually needs saving.

Not every mistake requires rescue. Not every project needs another hour. Not every opinion deserves equal weight. Not every hour already spent is a reason to spend another.

And sometimes, before you panic, there is really only one question that matters:

Did you get blood on the piece?

-G

Parenthood is full of these tiny disappearances no one warns you about. The last time you buckle a car seat. The last school pickup. The last time someone needs you to cut their food, check under the bed, sign a permission slip, stand in the hallway while they get ready because apparently getting ready is a communal activity. You almost never know it’s the last time while it’s happening.

I spent so many years inside the machinery of raising children that I assumed it would always feel loud and immediate. Someone always needed shoes. Someone had forgotten something. There was a lunch to pack, a ride to give, a form to sign, a mysterious smell to investigate. And then, slowly, the emergencies become their own. They make their own plans. They solve problems without announcing them. They leave the house carrying bags you didn’t pack.

This is, of course, the entire point. You raise children so they can become people who do not need you standing beside them reminding them to bring a sweatshirt. Very inconsiderate of them to succeed.

The oldest going back to college feels different now than the first time. There is less panic in it. Less wondering whether they know how to do laundry, whether they’ll eat anything besides cereal, whether they’ll accidentally sign up for an 8 a.m. class and ruin their own life. They know how to leave now. Maybe that’s the part that stings.

And the younger one starting junior year feels like someone quietly turned the calendar two pages ahead while I was looking somewhere else. Junior year sounds dangerously close to adulthood. I object.

Not because I want them to stay small. I don’t, really. I like the people they’re becoming. I like hearing their opinions, watching them figure things out, seeing pieces of themselves emerge that clearly do not belong to me at all. That might be one of the strangest parts of parenting older children: realizing how much of them was never yours to shape in the first place. You kept them alive. You taught them things. You loved them ferociously. And then they became themselves anyway.

There is something beautiful about that. There is also something that makes you stand alone in the kitchen for a minute longer than necessary.

I think we talk about milestones as if they are clean little celebrations. First day of school. Graduation. College move-in. Driver’s license. Take the picture. Smile. Post it. But the truth is that most milestones have grief folded inside them. Not tragedy. Not regret. Just the quiet knowledge that this version of your life has ended.

The backpack is different. The bedroom is emptier. The school year has a number attached to it that seems impossible. And you are still here, somehow, standing in the same house.

Maybe that’s why I felt unexpectedly emotional this morning. Nothing was wrong. That was the problem. Everything was right. They are growing. They are leaving. They are becoming independent. Exactly as they should.

And I am enormously proud of them. I just wish time had the decency to look a little more sheepish about passing so quickly.

May they always know the way home.

-G

Motivation, unfortunately, is unreliable. I would like it to behave like a competent employee. I would like it to arrive at a reasonable hour, carrying coffee, with a clear plan and perhaps a useful folder system. Instead, it appears while I am driving, trying to fall asleep, or halfway through doing something that absolutely cannot be abandoned for three hours of moving flowers around on a screen. Then, when I finally sit down to work, the idea is gone and I am left staring at Adobe as if we have both been summoned to a meeting neither of us prepared for. Gardening works the same way. In February, I have visions. I order seeds for things I have never successfully grown and plants described as “easy” by people who clearly live under different laws of nature. By August, I am outside in damp clothes holding a tomato with a bite out of it, trying to determine which creature has been enjoying the harvest more than I have.

And yet I keep doing both. I think that is the part of motivation we get wrong. We treat it as the thing that makes us begin, when quite often it turns up after we have already started, like a guest arriving late to a funeral and pretending this was always the plan. I rarely need enough enthusiasm to create an entire finished piece. I need enough to open the file. Sometimes that means moving one flower two inches to the left. Sometimes it means changing the background color and immediately changing it back. Sometimes it means spending twenty minutes deciding whether a moon should be slightly warmer and emerging from the experience with opinions about beige that would make me intolerable at a paint store. The garden works the same way. “I am going to garden today” sounds like labor. “I am going outside to cut those three dead stems” sounds harmless. Then I notice the roses need pruning, the tomatoes need tying, something has eaten the basil, and there is a caterpillar on the fennel so magnificent that I lose ten minutes admiring it and forget why I came outside. By the time I return, an hour has passed and my pockets contain seed heads, string, and one small rock I apparently considered important.

Very little worthwhile work begins with a grand surge of inspiration. It usually begins with messing around. That is true of both gardens and art, and it is comforting because messing around is much easier to do than “create something meaningful,” which is the sort of phrase that can make a person suddenly very interested in cleaning the refrigerator.

The other useful thing art and gardening teach is that failure becomes less dramatic once you experience enough of it. Seeds fail to germinate. Illustrations refuse to become what you imagined. Plants die after receiving exactly the care the label requested, which feels personal. You can spend hours making tiny adjustments to a piece only to realize you preferred it before you became involved. You can nurture a plant for three months and then find it collapsed overnight for reasons that will never be disclosed. There is no note. No explanation. Just a body.

This is usually when the mind becomes theatrical. One failed piece becomes evidence that I have no ideas. One bad garden bed becomes proof that I have learned nothing. A flower gets mildew and suddenly I am reviewing every decision I have made since 2009. It helps to remember that both art and gardening are mostly experiments that have been dressed up to look more intentional. You try something. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you save the file as FINAL_FINAL2_REALFINAL_USETHIS and then never open it again. Sometimes you plant something carefully and six months later have no memory whatsoever of what it was supposed to be. This is not failure. This is documentation.

I also think motivation survives better when everything does not have to become useful. There is enormous pressure now to wring a result out of every creative impulse. An illustration should become a print. The print should become a listing. The listing should become a post. The post should produce engagement. The engagement should eventually become income, or at least a little graph pointing politely upward. Gardening can become equally grim. Vegetables should feed us. Herbs should be dried. Flowers should be cut and arranged. Seeds should be saved. Suddenly every pleasant activity is being followed around by a clipboard.

Sometimes you should grow a flower because it is beautiful and mildly impractical. Sometimes you should make an illustration because you wanted to see if you could. Sometimes you should spend an hour drawing a moth that has no future whatsoever. It does not need to become a product, a post, or part of a five-step content strategy. It can simply sit there being a moth.

It also helps to stop worrying about repetition. I return to flowers, birds, moons, moths, tangled foliage, ornament, and things glowing faintly in the dark because apparently that is where my brain lives now. The garden repeats itself too. I buy another rose despite already owning roses. I see a nearly black flower and lose all financial judgment. I plant something because the photograph on the tag has clearly manipulated me emotionally. There is a difference between repeating yourself because you have run out of ideas and returning to something because it still interests you. Artists have a vocabulary. Gardens do too. Mine apparently contains a lot of moonlight and plants that look as if they know a secret.

The goal is not endless novelty. The goal is to remain curious enough to keep going. Curiosity is much more useful than discipline on the days when discipline sounds like something invented by people who enjoy spreadsheets. What happens if I move this? Darken that? Plant this somewhere it probably should not go? Try one more version? Some days this produces a finished illustration. Some days it produces a zucchini of such alarming proportions that it seems less like a vegetable and more like evidence.

There will still be days when the art is ugly, the garden is exhausted, and everything seems to have entered into an agreement not to reward your efforts. Those are poor days for making major declarations. Do not decide you have no artistic ability after staring at an image at 400 percent until individual pixels begin to feel morally offensive. Do not redesign the garden in August because three plants look bad and you are sweaty. Do not make permanent decisions while holding pruning shears.

Close Adobe. Go inside. Eat something. Return when you are less inclined to delete the entire file or dig up a shrub out of spite.

That is the real practice in both art and gardening. Not constant inspiration. Not constant success. Just continuing long enough to be surprised by what survives.

May your files save correctly, your tomatoes remain mostly uneaten, and your motivation return before the weeds do.

-G

And yet, every now and then I look around my house, my garden, or the general flaming dumpster of modern life and am forced to admit that the Victorians had a point. Not about child labor, obviously. About ferns.

The Victorians were absolutely deranged about ferns, and frankly I respect it. They collected them, cultivated them, pressed them into albums, decorated their houses with them, and apparently reached a cultural consensus that there was no such thing as too much fern. Correct. A fern has never once ruined a room. Put one in an empty corner and suddenly you don’t have a depressing corner anymore. You have a conservatory. You have atmosphere. You may possibly have inherited a mysterious estate from an uncle Ernest nobody remembers meeting.

We should all own more ferns.

The Victorians were also right about conservatories, which are essentially rooms built entirely because somebody wanted to sit among plants while remaining unwilling to experience weather. That is civilization. I don’t want a home gym or a media room. I want a glass room containing an orange tree, an unreasonable number of begonias, one uncomfortable iron chair, and the distinct possibility that a ghost might wander through at dusk.

They were also correct about writing letters. I know email is efficient. Texting is efficient. We have optimized human communication to the point where another person can contact us while we’re standing in the shower, and this feels like a design flaw. A letter, meanwhile, requires effort. Paper, a pen, a stamp, and possibly some dramatic staring out a window.

You cannot casually send someone a handwritten letter saying “k.” Nobody has ever opened an envelope, unfolded two sheets of cream stationery, and discovered only the word “lol.” There is dignity in inconvenience.

Also, sealing wax should come back, not because it serves any practical purpose whatsoever, but because we have allowed practicality to win far too many battles. I would like to receive my electric bill sealed with a signet ring. The post office may be annoyed with me, but I will be delighted.

The Victorians also understood something important about flowers: they should occasionally be allowed to mean far more than is reasonable. There was a whole language attached to them. You could send somebody a bouquet and, depending on what was in it, apparently communicate affection, disdain, mourning, fidelity, jealousy, or possibly “I know what you did.”

We replaced this with the thumbs-up emoji. Progress is complicated.

Imagine getting into an argument with someone and, instead of sending a passive-aggressive text, simply leaving a carefully arranged bouquet of tansy and rue on their doorstep. No explanation. Let them research it. This is conflict resolution with craftsmanship.

And then there was mourning. The Victorians took mourning very far, with rules, timelines, clothing requirements, and jewelry made from the hair of the deceased, which is admittedly where I begin edging toward the exit. Still, they understood that grief should not be expected to tidy itself up quickly and return to work Monday morning. They made room for it.

Modern culture is uncomfortable with anything that can’t be solved, scheduled, optimized, or turned into a five-step morning routine. The Victorians occasionally said: someone has died, this is terrible, wear black for a while. There is something almost merciful in that.

They were also right about having a faintly ridiculous amount of stuff on the walls. We spent years being told that tasteful homes required blank white spaces, one tasteful ceramic vessel, and perhaps a beige throw placed casually enough to suggest no human being had ever touched it.

The Victorians said absolutely not. Put up the paintings, then put up more paintings. Add botanical prints, portraits of relatives who appear to have known terrible secrets, shelves, tiny frames, an oval mirror, a dead butterfly under glass, and something brass that nobody can identify.

A house should reveal that someone lives there, preferably someone interesting.

And finally, the Victorians were unquestionably right about being dramatic about gardens. A garden was not merely landscaping. It was a grotto, a fernery, a rose walk, a moon gate, a place for contemplating mortality beside a strategically placed urn.

Meanwhile, we have somehow reached a point where landscaping advice frequently boils down to installing three identical shrubs beside a garage and covering the remaining earth with decorative gravel. No. Give me the archway, the crumbling stone path, foxgloves taller than a child, and roses climbing something they were specifically told not to climb, like the basketball hoop.

Put a bench somewhere slightly inconvenient and surround it with enough foliage that sitting there feels like disappearing. Plant something fragrant near the door. Plant something poisonous farther away. Grow a vine that eventually becomes a household discussion.

This is a garden, not a bank parking lot.

So yes, the Victorians made mistakes. Enormous ones. Occasionally luminous-green, arsenic-based mistakes. But on ferns, flowers, letters, mourning, crowded walls, excessive gardens, and the general principle that everyday life should contain at least a little unnecessary beauty, they were right.

Unfortunately.

May your ferns be excessive, your walls overcrowded, and your correspondence properly sealed with wax.

-G

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

You expect a child you haven’t seen in ages to be taller, certainly, and perhaps marginally less sticky. You do not necessarily expect to be launched, almost coincidentally, into a conversation about orchid mantises.

And yet.

She began talking about them with the kind of bright certainty young adults sometimes have when they’ve discovered something both wonderful and deeply strange, which is honestly the best possible way to encounter any creature. Not through a textbook. Not through a grim educational poster in a school hallway. But through the delighted urgency of someone saying, essentially, have you heard about this bizarre tiny being, because it is incredible and I need you to know at once.

If you are unfamiliar, the orchid mantis is exactly the kind of organism that makes you suspect the natural world is showing off. It looks like a flower and an insect collaborated on a dramatic costume and then got a little carried away. It is beautiful in a way that is almost suspicious. Too elegant. Too improbable. Like something designed by a moonlit committee of ghosts, botanists, and theater people.

Naturally, I became obsessed.

I have always had a soft spot for things that live in that delicious space between lovely and unsettling. The garden is full of them, if you pay attention. Blooms that smell faintly of death. Seed pods that rattle like curses. Vines that behave as though they’ve taken a personal interest in structural collapse. An orchid mantis feels perfectly at home in this company. It is one of those creatures that seems almost invented—too ornate, too specific, too committed to the bit.

So of course I did what any reasonable person would do: I immediately began trying to make art about it.

This is, I think, one of my favorite ways for a piece to begin. Not with a grand plan, not with a market strategy, not with me solemnly deciding to “explore a concept,” but because someone said something strange and beautiful and it lodged in my brain like a burr. Suddenly I was looking at orchids differently. Suddenly I was thinking about camouflage, delicacy, danger, moonlight, petals that aren’t petals, and the general treachery of beauty.

That’s the magic of conversation, isn’t it? Especially conversation with someone younger, who hasn’t yet learned to act as though wonder should be rationed. Adults are often terribly committed to pretending that the world is ordinary. Young people are much better at reporting back from the frontier.

And the truth is, I need those reports.

Lately, so much of adulthood seems to involve logistics. Shipping labels. Meal planning. Email. Laundry in various emotional states. Very little about daily life encourages a person to drop everything and contemplate an insect disguised as a flower. But perhaps this is exactly why we should. Perhaps the continued survival of the human spirit depends, at least in part, on occasionally becoming derailed by a gloriously weird mantis.

So I started working on a piece.

It has orchids, obviously. It has mood. It has moonlight, because nearly everything in my artistic life eventually wanders under a full moon. It has that tension I’m always chasing—the place where something is lush and beautiful but just a little uncanny. The place where the petals are soft, but something in them is watching you.

I don’t know whether the final piece will fully capture what I loved most about that conversation, which was not simply the orchid mantis itself, but the act of being reintroduced to astonishment by another person. But I’m trying.

And maybe that’s the real gift of moments like this. Not just inspiration, though that’s lovely. Not just a new painting idea, though I’ll certainly take it. But the reminder that the world is still full of marvelous and improbable things, and that sometimes all it takes is one conversation to knock open a little hidden door in your mind.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be over here thinking about orchid mantises and trying not to fill the entire house with increasingly specific references to “floral predation” and “petal-based deceit.”

Art, as always, is proceeding normally.

May your flowers be beautiful, your predators impeccably dressed, and anything wearing a tiny crown be treated with appropriate suspicion.

-G

I was already an artist. I had been drawing and painting for years, and I possessed the unwavering artistic judgment available only to teenagers.

Chili peppers?

Ugh. Why? That’s so boring.

I don’t remember exactly what I wanted to paint instead, but I’m sure it was vastly more serious, gothic, interesting and contained absolutely no cheerful kitchen vegetables.

This is especially ridiculous in retrospect because I later went through a phase of making whimsical mushrooms from polymer clay, painting them as if they had wandered straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

I made mushroom garlands.

Garlands. Of mushrooms.

Apparently, chili peppers were beneath me, but festooning the house with tiny enchanted fungi was the work of a serious artist.

Decades later, I am digitally “painting” poisonous flowers, blackberry brambles, moths, moonlit gardens, pitcher plants, herons, owls, and the occasional tasteful skull.

So, Mother, if you’re reading this: you were not wrong about botanical art. You were simply wrong too early—and perhaps insufficiently strange in your choice of produce.

I’ve been making various forms of art for most of my life, and plants have clearly wandered through it before. But only recently has my own garden become a real source of inspiration. For years, gardening and art occupied different rooms in my mind. Gardening involved dirt, weather, wildlife, rampant vines, and muttering. Art involved paint, clay, strange ideas, and a different but equally committed form of muttering.

Then the boundaries began to fail.

Flowers started appearing in my artwork larger, moodier, and dramatically illuminated by the moon. Blackbirds settled among the blackberry canes. Moths spread their wings over poisonous blossoms. Owls took up positions of authority. Carnivorous plants became even more theatrical than carnivorous plants already are, which is saying something.

The garden had followed me indoors.

Gardening teaches you to look closely: at the architecture of a seedpod, the powdery bloom on a piece of fruit, the way a bird balances on a thorny cane, or the particular shade a flower turns just before it begins to die.

It also teaches you that beauty is rarely tidy. The most interesting parts of a garden are often tangled, bitten, decaying, overgrown, or behaving in ways that were not included on the plant tag.

That is the garden I want to make art about.

In the real garden, I have very little control. Squash vines make territorial decisions without consulting me. Tomatoes collapse beneath the weight of their own ambition. Rabbits perform unauthorized pruning. August arrives like a large, damp hand pressing down on everything.

In my painted gardens, however, I can negotiate.

I can decide where the moon rises. I can persuade flowers to bloom beside birds they might never meet. I can make blackberries glow like jewels instead of hiding behind three layers of thorns and demanding a blood sacrifice. Nothing develops powdery mildew unless it contributes to the atmosphere.

Recently, some of these strange little ecosystems have become prints, notecards, and botanical bookplates for bibliophiles in my Etsy shop (did I mention I also LOVE to read?). Someone even bought one, which caused me to refresh the order page several times just to make sure Etsy hadn’t made some sort of clerical error.

Writing about that first sale made me realize I want to share more of the art here—not as a departure from the garden, but as another path through it.

Apparently, after all these years, I have become a garden artist.

I might even paint a chili pepper.

But it will need dramatic lighting, an ominous moon, and possibly a mushroom garland.

Until next time, may your old creative phases return bearing evidence—and may nobody find the photographs.

-G

Someone bought your art.

Specifically, someone bought Moon of the Datura, a 16-by-20-inch print filled with luminous white flowers, moonlit blue mosaic, and the sort of elegant nocturnal atmosphere suggesting that something mildly supernatural may be taking place just outside the frame.

My first reaction was pure joy. A real person had seen something I made, loved it, and decided to hang it in their home. The print was no longer merely an image sitting in my shop, wearing a brass frame in a digitally staged room and trying to look nonchalant. It had somewhere to go.

My second reaction was: How do I mail a 16-by-20-inch piece of paper?

This is how running a small art business works. Every transcendent creative milestone is immediately followed by a packaging emergency.

For several glorious minutes, I had been an Artist. Then I became the Regional Director of Cardboard Acquisition.

A print this size cannot simply be placed in an envelope unless the envelope has been reinforced to withstand rain, machinery, spite, and the full weight of the modern postal system. It also cannot be folded, unless the buyer ordered Moon of the Datura: Convenient Pocket Edition, which they did not. That left a mailing tube: an object that sounds extremely straightforward until you begin researching it.

You might assume a mailing tube is just a cardboard cylinder with caps. Naive child.

Mailing tubes have diameters, wall thicknesses, usable interior lengths, end-cap depths, carrier surcharges, and strong opinions about geometry. A 24-inch tube was unnecessarily long. A 2-inch tube might roll the print tightly enough to qualify it as a botanical spring. An 18-by-3-inch tube appeared to be the answer, provided the print was rolled along the correct dimension and packed with approximately one inch of protective breathing room at each end.

Then I discovered that the United States Postal Service charges extra for cylindrical packages because they roll.

Of course they do. Even in transport, the datura refuses to behave.

Apparently, the sensible long-term solution is a square mailing tube. It holds a rolled print but does not attempt to escape across the sorting facility like a cardboard log fleeing the authorities. I have now ordered square tubes for future sales, which is the sort of sentence that signals genuine personal growth. Unfortunately, the future square tubes do not help the present print. The present print must travel in a traditional round poster tube, proudly incurring a surcharge for possessing the wrong silhouette.

Before it can begin its journey, it must be protected with glassine or acid-free tissue, wrapped in clean kraft paper, rolled gently, secured without tape touching the artwork, cushioned so it cannot slide, and sealed with enough determination that the end caps do not launch themselves into Missouri.

Packing an art print turns out to involve many of the same rituals one might use to store an ancient royal document. Clean hands. Archival materials. Careful rolling. Low voices. No sudden movements near the paper.

I also investigated the packing slip, which contained more personal information than I wanted to send into the world. Fortunately, packing slips are optional. The buyer already has an electronic receipt, and no one has ever opened an art package and whispered, “Beautiful—but where is the administrative paperwork?”

Instead, the print will include a personal note thanking its new owner for giving Moon of the Datura a home. The note wishes them moonlight, botanical mischief, and exactly the right amount of nocturnal drama. It also explains that the flowers have promised to behave after midnight, although datura is notoriously unreliable.

And beneath all the tissue paper, postage calculations, address settings, and cardboard engineering, something genuinely wonderful has happened.

A stranger found my art.

Out of every image they could have chosen, they chose this one. Soon, something that began here—among my ideas, revisions, doubts, flowers, moons, and persistent bee medallions—will be unrolled in another home. Perhaps it will hang in a bedroom, a reading corner, or a hallway where the moon catches someone’s eye as they pass.

That is strange. It is exciting. It is slightly terrifying.

And it is worth every ridiculous minute spent learning about the migratory habits of cardboard tubes.

Until next time, may your art find a home, your flowers remain suspicious, and your mailing tubes stay square.

-G

Subscribe now

This is not generosity. It is a protection racket.

Blackberries occupy the moral territory between fruit and barbed wire. They arrive bearing tiny white flowers, feed the bees, shelter the birds, and produce berries so dark and lustrous they look like jewels stolen from a minor woodland deity. Then, while everyone is distracted by pie, they advance six feet into the lawn, seize the fence, and establish a satellite government inside the azaleas.

Here on the northern edge of the Deep South, blackberries are everywhere: woodland edges, abandoned fields, roadsides, drainage ditches, and suspicious corners of the garden where nobody has looked closely since April. Possibly March. They thrive in precisely the places where civilization becomes distracted. Give them sun, disturbed soil, and a momentary lapse in garden enforcement, and they will begin building an empire.

The blackberry belongs to the genus Rubus, a sprawling family of raspberries, dewberries, cloudberries, and other brambly relations. “Brambly,” in this case, is a polite botanical term meaning “armed and difficult to reason with.”

Those things stabbing you are not technically thorns. True thorns are modified branches. Blackberry weapons are usually prickles: sharp structures growing from the plant’s outer tissue, more like a rose’s detachable little shivs. This distinction is extremely meaningful to botanists and provides no comfort whatsoever when you are bleeding into the berry bucket.

The fruit itself is also operating under an alias. A blackberry is not a single berry in the strict botanical sense. It is an aggregate fruit composed of many tiny drupelets, each one containing its own seed. What appears to be one berry is therefore a crowded committee of miniature fruits that has agreed, for the moment, to act as a unit.

This may explain the seeds in your teeth. You have eaten the entire committee.

Blackberries conduct their business through canes. In many varieties, the first-year canes—called primocanes—concentrate on vigorous leafy growth. In their second year they become floricanes, produce flowers and fruit, and then die, having completed their assignment. Meanwhile, fresh primocanes are already pushing up from below, because the organization understands succession planning.

Some blackberries also employ a maneuver called tip-rooting. An arching cane touches the ground, grows roots at the tip, and creates a new plant. This is less propagation than annexation. The blackberry reaches over, plants a flag, and announces that the neighboring flower bed has always been part of Blackberry.

Gardeners often make the mistake of interpreting the first modest cane as the entire plant. We trellis it. We water it. We speak encouragingly about future jam. The blackberry listens patiently while developing infrastructure underground.

By the third year, it has developed several new canes, a distribution network, and opinions about property ownership.

None of this is to suggest that blackberries are villains. Villainy is a human concept, and blackberries have no interest in our legal system. Their behavior makes perfect ecological sense. Their flowers provide nectar and pollen for insects. Their dense, thorny colonies create shelter for birds and small mammals. Their fruit feeds everything from songbirds and raccoons to foxes and black bears.

Naturally, these animals return the favor by transporting blackberry seeds to exciting new locations, such as field margins, woodland clearings, and the exact spot behind your garage where the mower cannot reach.

It is a successful arrangement. The blackberry provides lunch. The wildlife handles expansion.

For humans, harvesting them requires a peculiar mixture of greed and tactical planning. The finest berries are always located three feet inside the thicket, just beyond a defensive wall of canes. The berries near the path will be either underripe, fermented, occupied, or recently sampled by a bird with poor table manners.

But deeper in the bramble hangs one perfect blackberry: enormous, matte-black, and warmed by the afternoon sun. You can see it. You can almost taste it. You need only lean forward a few more inches.

This is how the blackberry chooses its victims.

Soon your sleeve is caught. A cane has hooked the back of your trousers. Something is crawling down your neck. You cannot move forward, backward, or maintain the dignity expected of an adult homeowner. The blackberry remains inches from your fingertips, glowing with the serene confidence of an object that knows you will sacrifice blood for it.

And you will.

A perfectly ripe blackberry tastes like late summer collapsing under its own abundance: wine-dark, floral, tart, and sweet enough to erase the previous six minutes of physical combat. It is the flavor of overgrown fences, hot fields, thunderstorms gathering in the distance, and coming home with purple hands.

Cultivated thornless varieties are available, of course. These are excellent plants, productive and comparatively civilized. They can be trained neatly on a trellis, pruned according to instructions, and harvested without first notifying your next of kin.

Yet something about the wild, armed blackberry feels more honest. It does not pretend that sweetness should come without consequences. It offers nectar to bees, shelter to wrens, fruit to foxes, and jam to anyone prepared to enter negotiations wearing denim.

The blackberry does not want to kill you. It simply wants the fence, the meadow, the ditch, the garden path, and everything visible from the garden path. Your continued survival is acceptable provided it does not interfere with expansion.

So prune your canes. Tie up the new growth. Remove the spent floricanes. Keep the bramble within its allotted territory, or at least maintain the comforting illusion that you have done so.

Then, in July, carry a bowl into the thicket and pay your respects.

Bring gloves.

The blackberry remembers weakness.

-G

A perfect pear is pleasant. A pear with a bruised flank, a collapsing shoulder, and one small fly making long-term plans is a story.

In the great still-life paintings, nothing simply sits there looking pretty. Grapes gleam as though lit from within. Peaches appear indecently soft. Lemons spill from their peels in extravagant curls, exposing themselves like aristocrats who have misunderstood the evening. And somewhere nearby, almost inevitably, something is beginning to rot.

This was not carelessness. The painters knew beauty becomes more powerful when it is placed beside its own ending.

A flower drops one petal. A peach darkens. A glass tips close to the edge of the table. Insects arrive with the calm professionalism of estate lawyers. The whole arrangement whispers that abundance is temporary, pleasure is suspicious, and death has already accepted the invitation.

Gardeners know this instinctively.

We spend months waiting for the first tomato, then discover it split open after a storm. We admire a rose at breakfast and find it facedown in the mulch by dinner. The zucchini goes from “not quite ready” to “medieval weapon” during a single afternoon.

Nothing stays at its perfect moment for more than six minutes. Maybe less.

And yet that is often when the garden becomes most beautiful.

A poppy capsule after the petals have fallen has more gravity than the flower did. A pomegranate torn open reveals a small red catastrophe. Seedheads blacken against the winter sky. Apples soften under the tree in Autumn, perfuming the grass with sweetness and mild corruption.

The Dutch still-life painters did not separate beauty from decay. They painted both at once because they understood they were the same event viewed from slightly different distances.

We have become less comfortable with this. We prefer the unblemished fruit, the fresh bouquet, the garden photographed before the beetles arrive. We crop out the brown edges. We remove the fallen leaves. We throw away the pear at the first sign it has developed a past.

But the bruises are where the drama lives.

Rot gives fruit a history. It suggests weather, hunger, handling, time. It turns decoration into evidence.

This may be why I keep returning to split pomegranates, fading flowers, skeletal stems, and plants caught somewhere between glory and collapse. I do not want the garden frozen at its prettiest. I want it mid-transformation—still beautiful, but no longer pretending it will last.

The Dutch masters knew a bowl of fruit was never merely a bowl of fruit.

It was a feast, a warning, a little funeral, and proof that even decay can be exquisitely composed.

May your fruit be fragrant, your petals dramatic, and your decay beautifully composed.

-G

It’s July and everything has changed.

Now the garden is a grand opera production. No one here seems to care about etiquette or decorum. There is no restraint. That boat sailed months ago.

Each year during the height of summer season, something happens. The garden literally explodes. One day it’s a pristine and well-behaved garden of greens, and the next it’s an explosion of color and foliage. At first, you don’t really take notice. In May everything is small and neatly arranged. Lettuce behaves itself, tomatoes grow straight and strong. Each little bed is carefully groomed and tidy. You can walk through the garden without being attacked from behind by the runner beans. The entire area appears to have been manicured so well that it makes you want to announce “I did that” to anyone nearby while pointing at your tidy rows of lettuce.

You stand there with your arms crossed admiring your creation thinking, “I’m good at this.” Nature catches wind of your confidence and begins to laugh.

July comes along and brings its flair of bling and gold brocade. All of a sudden, you’re not planting anymore - you’re lost in a garden version of 1800s Versailles. Stems wrap around each other, bloom, collapse, grow. Every part of the garden is excessive - as if every single plant thinks it’s the main attraction; loaded with flowers, fruits, even mold, dripping with whatever wildness nature decided to pull out of the back of her closet.

Tomatoes hang heavy with juicy red gems that seem to know their time is limited. You bring in trellises and stakes and bind them tightly together. You talk softly to them hoping some sort of magic will happen. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight it, they still fall to the ground.

A single yellow leaf pops up and suddenly the rest of the tomato plant is acting like it might pass out at any moment. You spend hours digging in the dirt searching for clues (insects, curses, etc.) while the tomato drops several of its blossoms as revenge and turns its back on you.

Meanwhile, the squash is on a mission. It takes over everything, burrowing under fences and sending monstrous zucchinis wherever it pleases. Under a leaf, you’ll find a zucchini the size of a baseball bat, just waiting for you like it was the punchline of a joke.

No one needs this much zucchini, but you’re helpless to stop it. Squash vs. Humans = a match made in heaven. Or hell. It’s hard to tell which. By August, all illusions have disappeared. Now, you’ve resorted to hiding zucchinis in baskets on porches, stuffing them into mailboxes and passing them out in old grocery bags like they were gifts from a crazy aunt instead of an admission of desperation.

Flowers? Sunflowers tower above you like smug guards. Bee balm blazes bright red and buzzes with bees like it’s the hippest new nightclub in town. Dahlias change outfits daily. And trumpet vine? Trumpet vine goes Miami-spring-break wild, ripping through gutters and dragging chunks of the house with it.

Not even the weeds are immune to the madness. That pesky thistle you thought you killed? It’s back - bigger and badder than before - daring you to try again. Pokeweed lurks in the shadows ruling over everything in sight. And bindweed wraps itself around poor rosemary like an angry ex.

Under all this mess somewhere is probably the chair where I’m certain I used to sit.

As for the herbs, they showed their true colors, too. Cilantro rolls over at the slightest provocation. Basil bolts when you finally see it. Parsley is temperamental, dill throws in the towel entirely - and mint? Well, mint is out of control - you can’t contain it - maybe you can’t even describe it anymore. It has a map of your yard and is planning the next patch it wants to conquer.

But every morning we’re out there. Carrying baskets and armed with pruning shears, trying to look composed (although we’d love to admit otherwise). We tie things up and pluck off leaves, crawl through the dirt underground and emerge with plants we never wanted to grow in the first place. We mutter “needs air” like it matters a whit, trapped in a jungle big enough to lose a rock band in.

Okay. This isn’t gardening anymore. This is theater: plants, insects, plots galore.

In springtime we dream and draw up plans. Summer arrives and our gardens have other ideas. And by mid-July we’re nothing more than gluttons feeding excess.

That’s why we keep coming back. Because it defies us - disregards our plans - hides all of our attempts at organization beneath an endless sea of excess and zucchini.

It spills across stone slabs, drinking from everywhere it likes, demanding even more compost as if it owns the joint.

So, we surrender. What else can we do?

May your garden run amok, may your shade hold firm, and may your zucchini capers remain safely under the radar.

-G

Subscribe now

The lavender is not “resting.” The rosemary is not “thinking about coming back.” The hydrangea did not “have a hard winter.” It is dead, and after weeks of snapping twigs and whispering encouragement into the mulch, I have been forced to accept that I am running a small botanical cemetery.

So, to prevent myself from buying the exact same plant next Saturday, I have begun writing obituaries.

Lavandula angustifolia, age four years, passed away after a brief relationship with North Carolina humidity. She arrived silver-leaved and fragrant, with the confidence of someone who had never spent August in the South. The plant tag said she enjoyed “full sun and well-drained soil,” but failed to clarify that she preferred Provence and not a clay basin behind my air-conditioning unit. She is survived by twelve identical replacements at the garden center, all of whom look frightened.

Rosemary officinalis, alleged perennial, died under mysterious circumstances sometime between Christmas and February. Possible suspects include cold, wet soil, wind, root rot, neglect, excessive concern, and the fact that I kept tugging on it to see whether it was still anchored. In life, Rosemary contributed approximately two tablespoons of leaves to roasted potatoes. In death, she became a brittle gray monument to fourteen dollars poorly spent.

The Fancy Japanese Maple, whose name I have forgotten because grief has erased it, departed during the hottest week of July. It had been selected after three nursery visits and emotional investment normally reserved for choosing a spouse. I planted it in “dappled shade,” which turned out to mean direct sun from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., also known as the daily cremation window. Its leaves curled inward with the dignity of aristocrats receiving terrible news. By August, it resembled an umbrella struck by lightning.

A tray of twenty-four delphinium seedlings died collectively before developing personalities. They were raised beneath grow lights, gently misted, rotated daily, and praised with embarrassing sincerity. Upon being transplanted outdoors, they were eaten overnight by something that left no footprints, droppings, or note. I assume slugs, though the speed and efficiency suggest organized crime. The accused were later found beneath a flowerpot, bloated and unrepentant.

The Blue Hydrangea, purchased because the label showed impossible cobalt flowers, passed after producing three years of respectable pink blooms out of spite. Technically, it may still be alive, but the plant I was promised never existed. Soil amendments were applied. Aluminum sulfate was purchased. Charts were consulted. The hydrangea remained pink, demonstrating that plants, like cats, recognize desperation and use it for leverage. Its obituary is therefore symbolic.

One basil plant, age nine days, died on a kitchen windowsill during a weekend trip. This was not my most complicated loss, but it was perhaps my most honest. Basil asks for sunlight, warmth, and enough water to avoid becoming a Victorian pressed specimen. I provided two of the three, then left town. It died exactly as expected, which somehow made it worse.

Gardeners rarely admit that we killed anything. We say it “didn’t take,” as though the plant declined a job offer. We say it “wasn’t happy there,” implying it packed a tiny suitcase and left. We blame the weather, soil, nursery, moon, rabbits, voles, fungal spores, municipal water, and occasionally the plant itself for lacking resilience.

Sometimes those excuses are even true.

Gardening is mostly the practice of placing living things into uncertain conditions and pretending we are in control. Some flourish. Some sulk. Some vanish overnight. Some survive despite our incompetence and become enormous, forcing us to explain that yes, the mint was intentional.

The dead plants leave gaps, but gardeners are strangely resistant to emptiness. We dig them up, amend the soil, reconsider the light, and install another hopeful victim. This is not denial. It is horticulture.

May they rest in compost.

-G

Gardening is generally presented as a wholesome activity. It appears in catalogues alongside linen aprons, sun hats, and people smiling serenely while holding baskets of vegetables that have never encountered a slug. But strip away the cheerful packaging and gardening becomes something far stranger. We bury dead-looking objects in the ground, whisper hopeful instructions over them, and wait for them to rise. This is necromancy. It simply has better public relations.

Every autumn, gardeners perform rituals that would look deeply suspicious without the presence of a wheelbarrow. We dig holes in the fading light. We place bulbs inside—small, pale, papery things with no obvious signs of life. They resemble onions that have been left too long in a crypt. Then we cover them with soil and walk away, trusting that several months later they will claw their way back toward the sun. No one calls the authorities. Instead, neighbors say things like, “I love what you’ve done with the tulips.”

Seeds are even less convincing. Many are tiny, dry specks that could easily be mistaken for dirt, insect debris, or the contents of an old coat pocket. Yet gardeners purchase them in decorative envelopes, carry them home with great ceremony, and arrange them under lights as though preparing an altar. Then comes the chanting. “Come on.” “Please germinate.” “I know you’re alive in there.” Occasionally, we threaten them. “I paid seven dollars for twelve of you.” The seeds remains silent, as seeds often do when accused.

Eventually, a small green loop pushes through the soil, and we experience the thrill of successful resurrection. The dead speck has returned. It is tiny, damp, and immediately in danger from fungus gnats, damping-off, and our own unbearable attentiveness. This is where gardeners differ from traditional necromancers. A necromancer raises the dead and presumably moves on to conquering kingdoms or asking forbidden questions. A gardener raises the dead and then spends the next four months worrying about moisture levels.

Plants also participate in a more theatrical form of resurrection known as “coming back from the roots.” A perennial can vanish completely in winter, leaving behind nothing but black stems and a patch of mud that looks like the site of a minor crime. Sensible people assume it is dead. Gardeners crouch beside it in March and say, “Not necessarily.” We know the roots are down there, plotting. Sometimes they return politely. Sometimes they return with an army. Mint is especially gifted in this area. Mint does not merely rise from the dead; it conquers neighboring territories and installs a fragrant dictatorship. You may believe you removed it, but this only encourages it to rethink its strategy. One spring morning, it appears six feet away near the foundation, looking refreshed. “I have returned,” says the mint. “Your borders mean nothing.”

Cuttings are perhaps the purest form of botanical sorcery. You take a severed piece of plant—an object that, by all ordinary standards, should be finished—and place it in water. Then you wait. Soon, pale roots emerge from the stem like little ghost fingers. Gardeners call this “propagation,” because calling it “creating an immortal army of identical hydrangeas” would make people uncomfortable.

Compost, meanwhile, is the underworld through which everything must pass. Dead leaves, collapsed flowers, vegetable scraps, and the remains of last summer’s tomatoes are gathered into a heap and allowed to decay. It smells earthy, mysterious, and occasionally like a terrible decision. Months later, we spread the remains back over the garden so that new life can feed upon the old. This is not a metaphor. The garden is literally built from its dead.

Perhaps that is why gardening can feel so comforting. It does not deny decay. It uses it. Nothing stays beautiful forever, but very little is truly wasted. The sunflower becomes seed. The leaves become soil. The fallen apple becomes a drunken wasp convention and, eventually, nourishment. Even failure is rarely final. A plant dies, and we learn something—usually that we planted it in the wrong place, sometimes that rabbits have no respect for personal property, and occasionally that a plant labeled “easy to grow” was lying.

Still, we try again. We bury another bulb. We press another seed into the dark. We water an apparently empty pot for three suspicious weeks because somewhere beneath the surface, something may be preparing to return. Gardening is faith for people who like evidence. It is also necromancy for people who own kneeling pads. So go ahead. Dig your holes. Bury your strange little objects. Speak gently to the soil and keep an eye on the mint. Spring will come, the dead will rise, and everyone will congratulate you on your lovely garden.

May your garden be lush, your shadows long, and your botanical crimes impossible to prove.

-G

Subscribe now

Ask enough questions and the answers become increasingly useless. “It was here when we bought the house.” “Your grandmother said the people before us planted it.” “There used to be a shed there.” “Maybe Aunt Linda did it.” Aunt Linda, when questioned, denies everything and changes the subject. The plant remains silent, which feels less like innocence and more like excellent legal counsel.

Of course, not every mysterious plant carries a beautiful history. Sometimes the forgotten plant is mint. Mint does not preserve ancestral memory. Mint preserves territory. There may be no touching story behind it. Someone made a small mistake in 1987, and the property has been dealing with the consequences ever since. Somewhere beneath the roots is probably a tiny flag bearing the words THIS IS MINE NOW. Even so, the mint remembers something: a gardener once stood there holding a tiny, harmless-looking plant and made a decision that would affect future generations.

Old gardens are full of these small hauntings because plants are better at remembering than people. Labels fade. Photographs disappear into boxes. Garden plans end up in drawers beside expired warranties and keys that no longer open anything. People move away, grow old, forget names, or begin referring to entire decades as “around the time we painted the kitchen yellow.” Meanwhile, the peony keeps excellent records underground. It remembers the old fence, the gardener who carried it home, and winters no living person saw. Every spring, it returns to the same patch of earth and tells us absolutely nothing.

Plants are irritatingly private.

My grandparents once bought a cabin set back from a beautiful meadow in the early 1970s. There was an old fountain, mature shrubs, a meandering rock garden, and enough quiet charm to make the place feel as though it had been waiting patiently for them. Then they learned the meadow was where the original house had burned down.

The cabin was the surviving warehouse.

Suddenly, the landscape rearranged itself. The fountain had not been placed beside a meadow; it had once stood beside a house. The rock garden had belonged to people whose rooms, furniture, and ordinary lives were gone. They had not bought a cabin with a charming old garden. They had bought the last surviving building beside the place where the rest of the story had burned away. This would explain the root cellar at the edge of the meadow.

Naturally, the Mock Orange continued blooming as though none of this required explanation.

That is the strange thing about old gardens. They remember differently than we do. Old roses crawl from hedges on thorny arms, producing flowers so fragrant they seem smug about surviving. Daylilies bloom around abandoned foundations. Violets gather beneath porches. Rhubarb persists behind garages long after anyone remembers making pie. Their original gardeners may be gone, but the plants continue reporting for duty.

Someone once stood in those places holding a shovel. Someone chose a plant, pressed its roots into the soil, and imagined what it might look like in ten years. Then twenty years passed. Then fifty. Houses changed hands. Children grew up. Trees fell. Names disappeared from mailboxes.

Sometimes the house disappeared too.

The plant stayed.

Perhaps this is one of the quietest forms of immortality available to ordinary people. Most gardeners do not expect to be remembered. We are too busy apologizing to dying annuals and pretending the shrub planted beneath the window will eventually understand architectural boundaries. We rarely think, This may still be blooming when nobody remembers who I was.

And yet it might.

An old garden is an archive written in roots. Woody lilacs may mark a boundary erased decades ago. Daffodils may trace a path buried beneath grass. A fountain may stand beside an empty meadow where a house once burned. The landscape keeps fragments of lives after the stories disappear. It does not explain them. It simply pushes them back through the soil every spring like evidence.

Happy gardening—and be kind to the old plant by the fence. It may remember the house that stood there before yours, and unlike Aunt Linda, it is taking the truth to the grave.

-G

Subscribe now

No one does this with household appliances. If a lamp came with a tag that said MAY CAUSE CONVULSIONS, we would leave it at the store. Plants, however, are allowed a certain amount of menace. Perhaps it is because they stand so quietly. A poisonous flower does not chase anyone. It simply grows in the sunlight, looking innocent, and waits for us to read the fine print.

Take the castor bean.

Ricinus communis is a tropical-looking spectacle with enormous star-shaped leaves and strange, spiny seedpods. Depending on the variety, it can look burgundy, bronze, green, or like something brought home from a botanical expedition that ended badly. Gardeners grow it because it becomes enormous in a single season and gives an ordinary flower bed the atmosphere of a mildly dangerous jungle. Its seeds also contain ricin, a highly toxic substance released when the beans are crushed or chewed. This is information that should reasonably end the sales pitch. Instead, many gardeners nod thoughtfully and ask how much sun it needs.

Then there is belladonna, or deadly nightshade, a plant whose name means “beautiful lady,” because apparently even poison benefits from good marketing. It produces dusky purple flowers and glossy black berries that look polished, mysterious, and entirely too much like something a fairy-tale child would eat moments before the chapter became educational.

Belladonna belongs to the same plant family as tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants, which feels less like botany and more like discovering that the cheerful family next door has one relative nobody discusses at holidays. It is beautiful, historic, dangerous, and burdened with enough folklore to qualify as its own haunted estate.

Foxglove is more respectable.

It rises in tall spires of pink, white, and purple bells, each flower delicately freckled inside as though painted by someone with very small brushes. It belongs beside cottage walls and crumbling stone paths. It also contains compounds that affect the heart. The same plant that helped inspire important heart medicines can be seriously poisonous when eaten.

Nature rarely believes in keeping its blessings and threats in separate containers.

Monkshood, also called wolfsbane, grows deep blue or purple flowers shaped like little hoods. It looks like something monks might have cultivated behind an abbey while refusing to answer questions. All parts are poisonous, especially the roots, and its toxins can affect the heart and nervous system.

Oleander may be the most deceptive of the group. It blooms generously in pink, white, red, and cream, often in places where the weather is warm and everyone is trying to have a pleasant afternoon. Yet every part of the plant is poisonous if eaten. Oleander has the energy of a charming guest who brings dessert and knows exactly where the bodies are buried.

So why do we keep planting these things?

Partly because danger is interesting.

A garden made entirely of harmless, well-behaved plants would be lovely, but it might also feel like a neighborhood where every mailbox matches. We are drawn to mystery. We like plants with old names, medicinal histories, strange chemistry, and reputations that arrive before they do.

But perhaps poisonous plants also remind us that nature was never designed solely for our comfort.

The garden is not a decorative extension of the living room. It is a living community with defenses, appetites, alliances, and rules that existed long before we arrived with a shovel and a color scheme.

Of course, admiration is not the same as carelessness. Poisonous plants require thought, especially around children, pets, livestock, and anyone likely to mistake a mysterious berry for a snack. “Do not eat the landscaping” is a useful household policy, but it should not be the only one.

Still, I understand the appeal.

There is something irresistible about a beautiful plant that comes with a warning. It asks us to look without possessing, admire without tasting, and remember that beauty does not owe us safety.

Sometimes the loveliest thing in the garden has teeth.

Until next time, admire the dangerous things from a respectful distance—and please keep the castor beans out of the salad.

-G

Subscribe now

Some flowers are content to be lovely. They bloom on schedule, behave well in photographs, and earn compliments from people in sun hats. Corpse flowers have chosen a different path. They rise from the soil looking prehistoric, open in shades of bruised wine and old velvet, and perfume the garden with the suggestion that something unfortunate has happened behind the tool shed. Naturally, they belong in the Gothic garden.

When most people hear “corpse flower,” they picture the enormous titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum. It can reach nearly ten feet tall and produces a flowering structure so immense that it seems less like a plant and more like a cathedral designed by beetles. Unless you own a heated conservatory and dream of hosting a funeral for a giant cabbage, the titan arum may be more ambition than houseplant. Fortunately, it has smaller relatives.

The most approachable is usually Amorphophallus konjac, also called voodoo lily or devil’s tongue. It can grow four to six feet tall, large enough to make a statement without requiring zoning approval. It begins as a heavy, knobby tuber that looks like a potato recovered from an archaeological dig, then sends up one enormous leaf resembling an entire tree. Its mottled stalk rises in green, gray, pink, and brown, as though someone attempted camouflage using paint salvaged from an abandoned manor. The result is elegant and mildly suspicious, like a palm tree that inherited a crumbling estate and refuses to discuss the circumstances.

Not every corpse flower is enormous. Some loom over ferns and hostas. Others remain around two or three feet, and a few are small enough for pots. Their umbrella-like leaves look at home among hellebores, dark foliage, mossy stones, and rusted iron. Eventually, a mature plant may bloom. Instead of its usual leaf, a thick stalk rises and opens into a deep maroon hood surrounding a tall central spike. The flower looks dramatic enough to demand organ music.

Then comes the smell. The plant is trying to attract flies and beetles by imitating decay, which is an excellent strategy if your preferred guests normally investigate roadkill. Humans are merely collateral damage. The flower is not evil. It is marketing. Roses appeal to poets. Lavender appeals to grandmothers. Corpse flowers advertise to insects with specialized dining habits.

Despite their appearance, corpse flowers are often easier to grow than expected. I’ve done it in my own backyard, much to my spouse’s disgusted dismay. They enjoy rich soil, moisture while growing, and protection from harsh afternoon sun. A shaded bed or woodland edge suits them well. Good drainage matters, because even plants associated with death have standards. Wet winter soil is not Gothic. It is merely unfortunate. When autumn arrives, the great leaf yellows, collapses, and disappears. You may assume the plant has died. It has not. Corpse flowers rest underground in their tubers, waiting for warmth to return. In colder climates, they can be grown in pots or lifted and stored. During dormancy, they need little water. Do not keep watering a dormant corpse flower because you feel sorry for it. It is sleeping underground like a cursed potato and would prefer not to be drowned.

This disappearance is one of their finest qualities. They spend months beneath the earth, then return without warning. Sometimes they come back as strange tropical trees. Sometimes they produce maroon flowers. Sometimes they smell as though the gardener has committed a major felony. A Gothic garden should not be made entirely of near-black flowers and dark foliage. Too much darkness becomes decoration. True Gothic beauty requires mystery: plants with hidden lives, unexpected shapes, and stories that make visitors pause. Corpse flowers are dramatic without seeking approval and strange enough to make the garden feel alive in ways that are not reassuring.

Besides, roses already have plenty of admirers. Save a little shade for the monsters.

Until next time, may your garden be lush, your shadows long, and your botanical crimes impossible to prove.

-G

Subscribe now

Every gardener eventually meets a plant that mistakes enthusiasm for a foreign policy. It usually begins innocently enough. You bring home a cheerful little perennial because the plant tag promises it’s “vigorous.” Garden centers use the word vigorous the way real estate agents use the word cozy. It’s technically true, but you’re about to discover you’ve been misled.

A vigorous plant doesn’t simply grow. It expands. It annexes. It views neighboring flower beds the way eighteenth-century empires viewed small, defenseless countries. The first year, you admire its determination. The second year, you become mildly concerned. By the third year, you’re researching whether restraining orders apply to vegetation.

Mint is perhaps the best-known offender. People still plant it directly into the ground despite thousands of gardeners emerging from the shadows each spring to whisper, “don’t do it.” Planting mint without a container is less a gardening decision and more an irreversible lifestyle choice. Long after humanity has vanished and our cities have crumbled into dust, archaeologists will uncover the ruins beneath a fragrant carpet of spearmint and conclude civilization was delicious.

Bee balm, which I adore, suffers from similar delusions of grandeur. It begins as a respectable little clump, politely feeding the pollinators. Blink twice and it’s halfway across the flower bed introducing itself to plants you’ve never even met. Every autumn I tell myself I’ll divide it next spring. Every spring it politely informs me that my opinion has been noted and discarded.

Then there are trumpet vines. If ambition could photosynthesize, it would be a trumpet vine. Give it a fence and it wants the shed. Give it the shed and it begins making suspicious inquiries about the house. Somewhere beneath every mature trumpet vine is a gardener quietly wondering where they went wrong.

This year’s grand champion, however, is my butternut squash. I planted a few seeds in the vegetable garden expecting a tidy little patch of squash. Instead, the vines plotted an escape sometime in mid June, grew through the fence with unsettling confidence, spilled over the sidewalk, and invaded the lawn like a slow-moving botanical apocalypse. Every morning they’ve advanced another several feet. At this rate, the neighbors will soon be harvesting my vegetables whether they want to or not.

Mowing has become less of a chore and more of a hostage negotiation. I carefully lift vines out of the grass before pushing the mower through, apologizing to both parties like an exhausted United Nations peacekeeper. The squash remains entirely unapologetic. It has continents to conquer. If I stood still long enough, I’m reasonably certain one would attempt to climb me simply because I happened to be available.

The funny thing is that none of these plants are trying to annoy us. They’ve spent millions of years competing for sunlight, water, and space. Every inch they gain is another inch their competitors lose. We, on the other hand, carefully install brick edging and decorative borders, then act surprised when a squash vine ignores them. To a butternut squash, an edging stone isn’t a boundary. It’s a mildly inconvenient speed bump.

Perhaps that’s why I rarely stay annoyed for long. The plants aren’t misbehaving. They’re simply following instincts that are far older than my landscaping plans. They’re doing exactly what evolution rewarded them for doing: growing wherever they can until something stops them. Usually that something is another plant. Occasionally it’s an exasperated gardener carrying pruning shears and muttering things that would make the compost blush.

After all, gardens were never meant to be museums. They’re living places full of organisms that have absolutely no interest in following our carefully drawn maps. Secretly, I think that’s why I love them. The volunteer sunflower, the wandering squash vine, the bee balm plotting yet another territorial expansion—they’re reminders that nature remains gloriously unimpressed by human opinions.

Until next time, keep an eye on your squash vines. World domination rarely begins with this much chlorophyll.

-G

Subscribe now

There comes a point in every gardener’s life when they realize they’ve been assigning moral values to insects. Bees are virtuous. Butterflies are friendly. Ladybugs are industrious. Fireflies are magical. Wasps, meanwhile, have been sentenced without trial. The verdict is unanimous. They are villains. This is understandable. A yellow jacket has all the charm of a tax audit with wings. It dresses in warning colors, flies with unsettling confidence, and has the social skills of someone who has just discovered they can solve every disagreement with a knife.

And yet as gardeners, we should leave them alone.

I know. I don’t like this any more than you do.

Wasps spend much of their day hunting the insects that spend their day trying to destroy your garden. Caterpillars, aphids, beetle larvae, cabbage worms, bratwurst-sized hornworms—if it’s chewing your vegetables, chances are something with a narrow waist and a personality disorder is already working on the problem. Paper wasps are particularly industrious. They scour plants with grim professionalism, seize unsuspecting caterpillars, reduce them to an unpleasant paste, and deliver them to their young with all the tenderness of a medieval executioner clocking in for another Tuesday.

It sounds monstrous until you remember what tomato hornworms do to tomatoes and potatoes.

The difference is that bees hired a better publicist.

Honeybees arrive wearing fuzzy little cardigans dusted with pollen, drifting from flower to flower as though they have nowhere important to be. Wasps arrive looking like they know where you buried the body. It’s hard to compete with branding like that. But the truth is that most wasps are not interested in you. You are simply an inconveniently large obstacle standing between them and whatever unfortunate caterpillar has been selected for immediate liquidation. Contrary to popular belief, they do not wake each morning wondering whose picnic they can ruin. They have nests to maintain, larvae to feed, and a long list of herbivorous criminals whose parole has just been revoked.

Nature, as it turns out, is less a peaceful kingdom and more an aggressively managed correctional facility.

Every rose has thorns because diplomacy failed. Every vine is attempting a hostile takeover of neighboring territory. The compost pile is a monument to the proposition that absolutely everything eventually becomes soup. Even butterflies begin life as gluttonous little leaf-eating machines before emerging with a completely rewritten public image. Nature has always understood the value of good marketing.

Wasps simply skipped the marketing department.

Instead, they patrol the garden like tiny gothic gargoyles with aviation licenses, silently removing problems before you’ve noticed them. They’re the cemetery groundskeepers of the insect world. No one enjoys seeing them, no one wants to talk to them, but if they all disappeared tomorrow you’d discover exactly how much work they had been doing. Gardeners spend astonishing amounts of money trying to accomplish what wasps do for free. We buy organic sprays, beneficial insects, traps, books, gadgets, and miracle products that promise to restore balance to the garden. The wasps asked only for a quiet corner beneath the shed roof and occasional custody of a few dozen caterpillars. Frankly, they’ve negotiated an excellent benefits package.

This isn’t to suggest becoming close friends. If they’ve built a nest beside your front door or inside your mailbox, diplomacy has reached its natural conclusion. Relocate the nest. Call someone with the appropriate protective clothing. Even gargoyles occasionally need reassignment. But if a wasp colony has chosen an obscure corner of the garden where only spiders and that suspiciously judgmental toad ever visit, perhaps let them continue their quiet little civilization.

Every hornworm they dispose of is one less you’ll discover after wondering why your tomato plant suddenly resembles Victorian lace.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve grown rather fond of wasps. Not because they’re friendly. They’re emphatically not. They have all the warmth of an undertaker who genuinely loves his work. But every gothic garden deserves a few monsters, provided the monsters are eating the right people.

And in my garden, they’re on the payroll.

Until next time, be kind to the things that quietly keep the world in order. Especially if they have a stinger.

-G

Subscribe now

When nighttime temperatures reach a consistent 60°F or above, I evict my houseplants. Not permanently. I’m not heartless. I simply escort them into the the shadier spots of the backyard, wish them luck, and let nature remind them they’re tropical plants—not decorative accessories that exist solely to collect dust next to a window.

The transformation is almost immediate.

After months of surviving on filtered and artificial light, dry indoor air, and my inconsistent watering schedule, they wake up. New leaves unfurl almost weekly. Stems thicken. Colors deepen. Plants that spent the winter looking like they were writing farewell letters suddenly begin plotting world domination.

Most common houseplants—philodendrons, monsteras, pothos, peace lilies, spider plants, and many ferns—love the warmth and humidity of summer. The higher humidity helps prevent crispy leaf edges, while warm temperatures encourage faster growth. Combined with brighter natural light, it’s the closest thing they get to their ancestral rainforest without the inconvenience of jaguars. Rabbits, however, are always an issue, and yes, they will eat your houseplants. I lost almost my entire collection two summers ago to hungry cottontails.

Of course, don’t throw your houseplants into full afternoon sun and expect gratitude. That’s less “summer vacation” and more “public execution.” Most houseplants need time to adjust after months indoors. Start them in a shady or lightly dappled spot for a week or two before exposing them to brighter light. They’ll thank you by not turning the color and texture of burnt toast. At maximum, they will work their way up to a few hours of morning sun, and I never allow direct sunlight after 11:00 am.

You’ll also notice they dry out much faster outdoors. Warm temperatures, wind, and active growth mean you’ll probably be watering more often than you did inside. Check the soil regularly instead of relying on your usual schedule. Summer has no respect for calendars.

The outdoors also introduces your plants to the local wildlife. Sometimes that’s a gentle breeze and a few curious bees. Sometimes it’s aphids, caterpillars, scale insects, or a squirrel with absolutely no sense of personal boundaries. Inspect your plants every few days, and definitely give them a thorough once-over before bringing them back inside in the fall. Your living room doesn’t need an insect immigration program. I’ve had tree frogs on my gallery wall and slugs on the carpet, much to my cat’s delight.

By the time autumn arrives, your houseplants will likely be larger, fuller, and healthier than they were in spring. Mine always come back looking suspiciously well-rested, as though they’ve spent the season at an expensive wellness retreat while I stayed home pulling weeds and arguing with rabbits.

Honestly, I can’t blame them. We all deserve a little fresh air now and then—even if we’re only pretending our patio is a tropical rainforest with fewer mosquitoes and significantly less existential dread.

May your monsteras grow monstrous, your calatheas forget they're calatheas, and your neighbors continue wondering why you own more plants than furniture.

-G

Subscribe now

Sometimes a rude neighbor or uncivilized child will ask why so many of my flowers are purple.

It’s because there are no truly black flowers.

I’ve searched. I’ve begged. I’ve wandered through nurseries with the kind of optimism usually reserved for lottery winners. Every year there’s another flower advertised as “black.” Black petunia. Black pansy. Black hollyhock. Black tulip. I rush over expecting something forged in the depths of Mordor, only to discover it’s eggplant. Every. Single. Time. The horticultural industry has apparently decided that if you squint at a dark purple flower after sunset, it counts as black. I disagree. I have higher standards.

Still, shades of deep purple are the closest nature seems willing to get, and I’ve made peace with it. Mostly.

My garden isn’t gloomy because I dislike bright colors. It’s gloomy because purple behaves like a magician. In full afternoon sun it glows with royal extravagance, but as dusk settles in, the petals slowly surrender to the shadows until they’re almost indistinguishable from the night itself. The flowers don’t disappear. They simply become mysterious. It’s an admirable life goal I hope to emulate.

One of my favorite accomplices is bee balm—more specifically, the darker cultivars that bloom somewhere between plum and “did someone leave a Victorian widow in the flower bed?” Hummingbirds adore it. Native bees crawl all over it. Bumblebees disappear into the shaggy blooms like toddlers hiding beneath laundry. Unfortunately, powdery mildew also finds bee balm irresistible here in the humidity of the South. Every summer it shows up looking like someone dusted the plant with confectioners’ sugar. It’s less “gothic elegance” and more “the ghost of a Krispy Kreme.” I forgive it. Mostly because the bees don’t seem to mind, and the blooms are worth the indignity.

Black hollyhocks are drama queens with the constitution of farm equipment. They shoot skyward in early summer, stacking velvety, almost-black blooms like they're trying to intimidate the neighbor's sunflowers. Japanese beetles treat them like an all-you-can-eat buffet, powdery mildew inevitably shows up uninvited, and every stiff breeze seems determined to fold the whole plant in half. Yet they keep flowering anyway, towering over the garden with theatrical confidence. Up close they're not truly black at all—just an impossibly deep shade of plum that only admits it's purple when the afternoon sun catches the petals.

Black dahlias are the divas of the summer garden. They demand rich soil, regular watering, and the occasional pep talk, then reward you with blooms so dark they seem to swallow sunlight. Every flower looks meticulously sculpted, as though nature spent an unreasonable amount of time arranging each petal. They're technically burgundy, of course—deep enough to fool your eyes until the light hits just right and reveals the secret. Like every so-called black flower, they're really just purple wearing excellent lighting.

Then there are the flowers that promise darkness and deliver disappointment. Black tulips. Black pansies. Black petunias. They’re all beautiful. They’re also liars. If plants could fill out dating profiles, they’d all claim to be six feet tall and “black,” when in reality they’re five-foot-eight and very, very purple.

I still buy them.

Hope springs eternal in gardeners.

Every spring I try to convince myself that this cultivar will finally be black enough. This one will absorb light itself. This one will make my garden look like Edgar Allan Poe hired a landscape designer. Instead, I get aubergine. Again.

But perhaps that’s part of gardening. We spend our lives chasing impossible things. The perfect tomato. The weed-free flower bed. Hydrangeas that don’t faint every July. A rabbit that respects property rights. A truly black flower. The failures don’t stop us. They simply become next year’s wish list.

Besides, the Gothic Garden isn’t really about black flowers. It’s about contrast. Deep purple bee balm against silver foliage. Black mondo grass curling around white foxgloves. Burgundy leaves beneath pale moonflowers. The illusion of darkness makes the light seem brighter. Every gardener knows this instinctively. Shadows give shape to sunshine.

So I’ll keep planting purple. Not because it’s black. But because it’s the closest thing nature has offered, and sometimes “almost” is beautiful enough.

Besides, if scientists can make glow-in-the-dark cats, surely someone can eventually invent a truly black peony.

I’ll be first in line.

Until then, may your flowers be dark, your compost rich, and your rabbits mildly disappointed.

-G

Subscribe now