13 People Who Found Life Purpose and Happiness in Gardening, From a Mom Growing Flowers to a Dad Teaching His Kids Kindness Through Landscaping

My dog sits in the same garden spot every night. Last week I dug there and found a sealed bag. Inside was my husband’s phone he said he “lost” 8 months ago. His birth year unlocked it. I checked the messages. 1 was from “Wife.” Turns out, he had the nerve to hide it on purpose and tell me he’d lost it. When I showed it to him that night, he went red and sat down. “The screen was cracked and the battery barely held a charge,” he said. “I wanted a new one, but money’s been tight and I didn’t know how to ask. So I said I lost it.”

He kept going. “Then I couldn’t throw it out. Every photo of the kids from the last years is on it, and I never backed them up. I put it in a freezer bag and hid it out there, meant to get the pictures off later. Later never came. I bought a $40 phone with my lunch money.” He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. I should have just told you.”

I wasn’t angry, to be honest, but I was really sad he’d felt he couldn’t ask. We plugged the old phone in that night and copied every picture onto the computer, 3,400 of them. He found the first one of our daughter in her hospital blanket and went quiet. The dog sits there because that’s where my husband dug that night, and he’s been waiting by the bed ever since.

After my dad left, my mom had 3 kids to get through college. So she cut back to part-time at the office and lived on very little for about 8 years, so our once middle-class family could afford school without a single loan. She filled the gaps with her backyard: zinnias, dahlias and sunflowers, cut every Friday and sold as bouquets out of a bucket at the end of the driveway.
3 kids, 2 state schools and 1 community college later, we all have our degrees and not one loan. We may have missed some of the finer things growing up, but I wouldn’t trade a day of it. Every time I pass a bucket of flowers on the side of the road, I buy a bunch.

I used to wonder why my dad missed most of my soccer games. He ran a two-man landscaping crew, and every Saturday morning, before he got to the field, he stopped to mow three older neighbors’ lawns for free. I’d sit in the truck sulking, and he’d say, “Grass doesn’t care how you feel, and neither does Mrs. Jasmine’s.”
Now I’m happy he’s made a third of my games. And I was ungrateful, no question. I watched Click last night with my parents and was not expecting that reaction from an Adam Sandler movie. Onions. This spring I handed my own kid the mower.

My parents worked like dogs all their lives. The week my dad retired, they tore out half the lawn and finally planted the garden they’d talked about for 30 years: raised beds, a row of dahlias, a bench. I show up and find them out there at 6am arguing about tomatoes, happier than I’ve ever seen them.

My grandparents spent time with us, gave us freedom to be kids, and were always our soft place to fall. Their backyard was half an acre of raised beds, an apple tree and a hose we weren’t supposed to touch. Nobody ever told us not to get dirty. Last summer I pulled up to their house with my own kids, and they ran straight to the hose.

We had a family trip fall through and couldn’t go. My dad had to fight for a refund, and when he finally got it back he donated all of it to a flood relief fund the same day, since the news had just broken. He said if he was prepared to part with it for a vacation, he wouldn’t miss it. That weekend he took the three of us to the garden center and gave us $20 each for seeds, and told us we could plant our own vacation. Mine is a row of sunflowers that’s taller than me every August.

In college my car was totaled at an intersection. Who knew a ‘72 Chevy could do a 270? One of my mom’s friends bought herself a new car and gave me her old pickup, with the proviso that someday I pay it forward. That truck got me through college and became the first truck of my landscaping business. Every spring I load it with shrubs and perennials and plant a yard for someone who can’t afford it. I’m still trying to live up to that kind of gift.

In 2014 I was working the register at a garden centre and going through a rough time financially. I had enough gas to get to work, but not enough to get home. A woman buying bulbs asked how my day was, and for some reason I answered honestly. I’d already told my manager, but I wasn’t sure what she could do.
This woman, who didn’t know me and had no reason to help, slid a $20 across the counter with her tulip bulbs and told me to pay it forward when I could. That $20, plus the $10 my manager gave me out of the till, got me home. I plant tulips every October.

I was working at a nursery at 18 or 19 (about ten years ago), and I complimented a woman on her pink glittery gardening gloves. She took them off and gave them to me. I protested and protested and protested, and she physically took my hand and pulled one on. It was the wildest, kindest thing, and it still stays with me. I wear them every spring when I plant the first row.

My mother will skip her own flower beds to help us plant ours, and she’d pick our tomatoes before her own dahlias every time. She puts her kids before herself in every part of life. I should call my mom.