Marc Hamer was “the gardener,” someone who, for part of each day, over the years of his career, would get on his knees to be hired, often pulling weeds.
He knew that his patrons in the big house, wine glasses in hand, would lean out and see him in his humble posture and perhaps say, “The gardener is here,” as if he had no name and that was his only purpose in life. land. . But it does not matter.
“If I felt silly worrying about the social, because I was in this beautiful relationship with these other living beings who were like me,” said the Englishman. Mr Hamer he said the other day, speaking from his home in Cardiff, Wales. “It felt like a prayer; I felt like I was actually humiliating myself, bowing down to the universe.”
A garden is a workplace, yes. But for anyone with a gardener’s soul, no matter their experience level, it’s also something else.
“A garden is always a place of worship, even if it’s really horrible,” Hamer, 66, writes in her latest book, “Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens,” her third in just four years. It is not surprising that every monastery has a garden, he points out.
The book is the latest volume in a memoir trilogy that began with the 2019 publication of the indie bestseller “How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in the Wild.” (Mr. Hamer has also worked as a self-employed mole hunter.)
About three years ago, when those knees got tired, he withdrew from it all.
“I liked to kneel in the garden; it was like bowing down to the world that made me, ”she writes in“ Spring Rain ”. As a gardener, he told me, “you are very aware that your existence is for a very short period of time, and that you are like plants, they sprout and flower, and then fade away.”
“I’m taking care of the garden”
Such moments of communion with forces greater than himself continue, but now in other forms: yoga, meditation, long walks. Or just sitting in his chair, feet up on the windowsill, looking out for a long period and watching the flowers floating on the branches.
“I’m still gardening, but I’m taking care of myself,” said Hamer, whose meditation cushion and yoga mat are often placed to view the small plot he’s redoing around the Cardiff house where he and his wife , Kate Hamer, a fiction. writer, have lived for three decades. Yes, he still has at least one part-time dirt-based practice; he described himself On Instagram recently as “barefoot and dirty”.
“I need to make this broken garden whole again,” he writes, “since it is no longer a useful space, it is something left over: a museum, a mausoleum that needs to change so that I can change too.”
This is a new chapter in your time on earth, and a new chapter for a field that has been many things. It was a yard for his children to play in, a storage place for his work equipment. It has long been the repository for unwanted or unneeded plant bits someone took home from work, including a lavender bush that has defiantly reached enormous proportions and thrived for 15 years, despite the conditions of shadow that he knows he should hate.
But mostly, he acknowledges, the space has been an afterthought, never given the care he gave to the landscape belonging to Miss Cashmere, the name he assigns to his former employer in his books.
“Working as a gardener,” he observed, “you don’t go home and then do your garden. You are too tired. You go home and you fall asleep in the chair.”
Always a gardener (if no longer a flower)
You can take the gardener out of the garden, but…
“Gardening is in my muscle memory and occasionally when I’m out for a walk,” Mr. Hamer writes, “I see a stem that needs pruning and absently reach for the pruning shears that for years I’ve hung in a leather sheath on my belt. every day.”
When, in some everyday exchange, you hear yourself say, “I was a gardener,” you are startled to realize that you have instinctively invoked the past tense.
“My body can no longer do that kind of work,” he writes, “but my mind is a whole garden: constant bloom, seed, and bloom.”
These days, he said, “I’m looking at dried poppy seed heads and seeing myself. So you get all of that I remember I died, really no? And that’s a very important aspect, I think, of a meditative or contemplative lifestyle.”
The zen of digging dahlia tubers
“Spring Rain” has two main characters, and yet only one. Half of the essays are in the first person, the musings of the current Marc Hamer, outfielder in transition.
Once, however, he was “the boy,” and that earlier aspect of himself appears in the other passages, represented in the third person.
The boy is the son of a father he calls Angry Dog and a distracted mother. At 16, he leaves home forever and lives out in the open for a while, “sleeping on the edge of the fields like a hedgehog, by the rivers like a water sprite, in the woods like a fox,” Hamer writes.
The boy had always been curious. “Children are designed to figure out how the world works in order to survive,” he writes. His younger self lies face down in the open air, watching the ants work, and then looks them up in an old encyclopedia that he discovered in the shed outside a rented house the family lived in.
“When I was a kid, I would open the seeds with my pocketknife and see what was inside and how they could work, or cones,” Mr. Hamer recalled. “Of course, you look at something to find what makes it work, and there is nothing that makes it work. Because it’s all the things together that make it work, it’s impossibly complicated.”
Seeking understanding, we cut it “into smaller and smaller segments,” he continued. “And at that point, you actually destroy the entirety of what is.”
A gardener and a meditator were germinating in him, inseparable and indelible aspects of the man he would become.
“You can’t be a gardener without mindfulness,” he said. “Gardening, meditation: it’s all pretty much the same, right?”
Digging up dahlias requires attention, he reminds us, or you’ll puncture the tubers.
“It’s not a dream at all, really,” he said. “It’s focused attention, a kind of single-pointed meditation, really, a mindfulness exercise in a very simple way. This is the definition of mindfulness, and it is a gateway to deeper meditation.
Can you give me this dance?
In the classroom, or in the house of worship? — that is the garden, all the lessons of life are played out before us. As we rake or weed, each action is its own form of meditation in motion.
Time after time, when things don’t go as planned, we are challenged to adopt an attitude of detachment and listen to the message of impermanence: Nothing lasts.
We strive to be here now (with a nod to ram dass, who died in 2019). On that subject of carpe diem, Mr. Hamer writes: “The melancholy fading of all flowers signals the brevity of life and screams at me: ‘Bloom while you can, fool!’ A mass of complex feelings, yet these flowers know no joy, funerals or lovers’ dresses, they are simply coagulated genes like us, evolved to survive and be passed on.”
This is a rich and tender time.
“As I wander the town where I was a gardener for so many years, I see the flowers I planted in the little front gardens of people who have died, moved, or just gotten old, and I feel like I have added love,” he writes.
But you also feel a sense of freedom. She recently turned in her lawn mowers. (Though she recalled thinking, “Now they’re his, he’s the gardener now; I wonder who I am,” as she loaded them into the man’s truck.) to France to see his granddaughter.
“As a younger person, there always seems to be an urgency, a rush to move on and do the next thing, because you have this ladder to climb or this journey to take,” he said. “I know what the ride is now; I have done all of that. And I know what the journey lies ahead of me. And because I’ve done all those other things, to me, that feels very liberating. And I’m not afraid.
In any case, there is lightning.
“I feel like I can go back and take out all the things that I’ve enjoyed in my life, and look at them again,” he said. “I dance with my wife.”
He added, “When I was young, when I worked hard, I was too tired to dance. I never danced. I was exhausted. Now I dance.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast. A Path to Gardeningand a book of the same name.
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