Gardening is hard work. Music can help.

Fueled by the energy of Brown and Green, my garden took root some 35 years ago. It was James and Al who accompanied me through its formative stages, always there as I wielded a boombox and a box of cassettes along with my long-handled shovel and pruning shears.

What is a garden, really, but a real-life version of the hit song from James Brown’s 1970 album “Sex Machine,” pulsing with real birds and bees? It’s impossible to sit still when he yells and struts. This is motivational music at its finest.

Brown and Green kept me moving, if not dancing, exactly, shod in my first proper pair of gardening boots, which happened to be brown and green. Those voices kept me company through long days of fighting the invasive plants that had taken over the place, smothering five giant apple trees that had lived for a century in my new weekend home.

Since then, I have spent years cramming my head with Latin botanical names and song lyrics, risking having worms in every bed of corn and also in the bed at night, the kind that repeats itself endlessly, preventing sleep.

Later, when the garden and the gardener had taken shape, and I was editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, I co-hosted a garden call-in show on the company’s Sirius Satellite Radio channel: a reason to seek more garden-themed music to start and end each commercial break.

As my taste for plants grew, to mix the common and the obscure, the tender and the tough, the native and the not-native, my musical preferences evolved to be just as eclectic.

So, based on extensive firsthand experience, my best gardening advice includes heeding English singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae’s lyrics: “Girl, put on your records / Tell me your favorite song / Go ahead and let your hair down.”

A Gardener’s Theme Song

Once you open up to the idea of ​​a gardening playlist, there are obvious options.

For example: “willow weeps for me”, which was covered by James Brown (as was Nina Simone and, before her, Louis Armstrong accompanied by Oscar Peterson). The Tom Petty song “Wildflowers” (which includes the line “You belong to the wildflowers”) also comes to mind, as does the Grateful Dead performing “Sugar Magnolia” (the name of my favorite variety of edible peas). .

A few entries on the growing playlist, like Jeb Loy Nichols”heaven right here”, sound as if they were composed as anthems for those of us who dig and dig (as the American-born musician does, on his farm in Wales). On the 2000 release, he sang: “Come to my yard / Sit back and let all your troubles go away / Come to my yard / ‘Cause right now heaven is here.”

Shorter, but equally to the point, is a line from Ben Lee’s “Catch My Disease,” which explains why I’d rather slack off here than venture out into the wider world: “My garden is a secret compartment/And this is how I like it”.

Because I see and hear the garden in everything, much of my “garden-themed” music isn’t about gardening at all.

So what? In a title or a chorus—Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” for example—it’s as if the artist is talking about some dimension of the gardening experience.

Including utter frustration.

Who among us ready to throw down the trowel and tear the place down hasn’t belted out the title line of the 1960s country hit “We must have been crazy”? A highly recommended version is John Prine’s duet with Melba Montgomery, one of the song’s composers, from the 1999 album “In Spite of Ourselves.”

Continuing on that tangent: When the song was a hit the first time around, it was performed by Melba Montgomery and George Jones, whose “Where the Grass Won’t Grow,” a ballad evoking the grave of a deceased love on a Tennessee farmland. . , could be the theme song to some nasty bald spots on my lawn that defy any greening efforts. Best Version: George Jones with Dolly Parton, Trisha Yearwood and Emmylou Harris, from “The Bradley Barn Sessions.”

“Everything Is Awful” by The Decemberists is another ditty that rings in my head when it hasn’t rained in weeks, or when it doesn’t stop raining, or (fill in the blank): the latest demonstration that forces bigger than ourselves are in charge.

a complete love

But in the garden, better times usually prevail, or none of us would be in it yet.

Etta James singing, “My love grows stronger as our affair grows older,” from “I’ve Been Loving You So Long,” nails the high notes of my relationship with the place.

A darker option to serenade my tan-and-green beloved: Wynn Stewart’s 1961 country hit “Big, Big Love” (later covered by KD Lang).

I know that scientists would warn me against anthropomorphizing nature and its creatures, renouncing objectivity and good sense. But why not? Gardening is, at its core, an intimate relationship.

Johnny Cash’s version of “You Are My Sunshine” tops my list of love songs as garden songs, as does Willie Nelson covering “Blue Skies,” the Irving Berlin composition from almost a century ago.

Roses, roses everywhere

During the pandemic, I came across a “quarantine” livestream of Willie Nelson’s son, Lukas, performing “Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)” from his album of the same name, while his father listened.

Nelson’s catalog for older adults has no shortage of gardening and nature-themed titles, including “I Am the Forest” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” In a single album, she counted three songs with “rose” in the name.

Like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Elvis Presley and even Al Green (in his reverent voice), Willie Nelson put a twist on the 1912 hymn “In the Garden,” which opens by invoking the rose: “I come to the garden alone/ While the dew is still on the roses.”

Other pretty flowers include John Prine’s version of “‘Til a Tear Becomes a Rose” and 1966’s “Misty Roses,” heavily covered by Tim Hardin: “They seem misty roses to me/Too soft to touch/But too lovely to leave only.”

“A Good Year for Roses” by George Jones (try the Elvis Costello interpretation) contrasts the staying power of flowers with a marital low point: “But what a good year for roses/So many flowers still linger there/The lawn could take another mow/It’s fun, I don’t even care.”

And it’s not just roses. Many songs about trees are also on the list, notably Tom Waits singing “last sheet” with Keith Richards, noting that we, plants and people, are all ephemeral.

Trees headline many love songs, like JJ Cale’s “Magnolia,” often embodying the traits needed to be successful. In “Strong Enough to Bend,” Tanya Tucker reminds us of the virtue of being flexible, or: “There’s a tree in the backyard/That’s never broken in the wind/And the reason it still stands /It was strong enough to bend.

In “The Pine Tree,” Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash explore the dangers of infidelity: “I lean my back against you, thinking you were an oak tree/ I knew the wind could bend you but I can’t believe you broke/… The Willow Tree it is fickle and cries in the morning dew/ My love is a pine, that is the only tree that is true.”

Just for fun

You can create entire playlists that explore an individual element of weather or a particular season, including cabin fever months, when the garden may be out of reach.

John Hiatt’s “Wintertime Blues” does just that: “Three hours of daylight and all of them grey/The suicide prevention group has run away/I’m running out of groceries, I ain’t got no rubber shoes/Bring the baby bacon I have the winter blues.”

Insects could be another subcategory, and one of them is Slim Harpo’s 1957 “I’m a King Bee” (later covered by the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, and Pink Floyd).

Do you prefer birds? Hear Bettye LaVette reinvent the Beatles’ “Blackbird” or G. Love & Special Sauce do “Two Birds” (with two extra arthropods): “We’ll be like two birds singing in the moonlight/Two fireflies lighting up the sky.”

And just for fun, how about a song about pruning (or at least one you can pretend to)? the works of Cat Stevens “The first cut is the deepest”; try the soul version of PP Arnold.

Add anything from Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant to the lineup, simply by virtue of his last name. And the Willie Nelson/Leon Russell duet of “Don’t Fence Me In” is perhaps sung from Bambi’s perspective?

Carmen McRae doing “Duke Ellington”tulip or turnip” always brings out a smile, because we could all use a “dream face” (human or horticultural) in our life: “Tulip or turnip, rosebud or rhubarb/Steak or simple beef stew/Tell me, tell me, tell me , dream face / What am I to you?

In Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel “Beautiful Losers,” he wrote, “Music is the emotional life of most people.” On his posthumous album, “Thanks for the Dance,” we hear her voice reciting a poem, “Listen to the Hummingbird”: “Listen to the hummingbird / Whose wings you can’t see / Listen to the hummingbird / Don’t listen to me.”

As always, I agree with him. These days when working outdoors I usually listen to open source music from nature instead of recordings. But I keep collecting them anyway.

Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast. A Path to Gardeningand a book of the same name.

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