Social Gardening
At the end of April, we hosted a pruning workshop at the garden center. The idea to present this workshop came from the Garden Club of Lake Placid, who had hosted us to deliver a presentation on pruning many years ago at one of their monthly meetings. The workshop was a hands on presentation in which we showed the attendees various pruning techniques on some of the most frequently asked about shrubs and the best tools and practices for addressing their pruning needs, and allowed our guests to try to prune the shrubs that we were learning about.
Pruning is one of my favorite gardening tasks. I love preparing a plant for the upcoming season when it’s easy to see its structure without the leaves that obscure its stems (at least on deciduous plants) during the growing season. Pruning is very meditative for me and it calms my mind when the warming weather seems to create so many gardening tasks to grab my attention with varying levels of urgency. Pruning provides a window into a plant’s future self as I assess unnecessary branches, winter damage and structural shape and size.
While I was demonstrating how to prune the plants that I had chosen to prune, one young attendee continued to ask “Why” when I would explain how to perform certain pruning tasks. I told him that asking “why” was one of the most important questions to ask when taking branches off of a plant and I would encourage everyone to ask themselves that question when contemplating the task of pruning so that they are clear on the objective that they are trying to achieve.
Pruning with a crowd of interested gardeners turned the ordinarily solitary task of pruning into a social event and I enjoyed seeing all of the members of the garden club greet each other in what might have been their first time gathering after the long winter. It was clear to me that the members of this club were getting more than just practical information to help them with their gardens: they were also satisfying a social need by gathering together with their friends who had similar interests and concerns about their gardens.
We hear a lot about our social disconnection from each other lately as we increasingly spend more of our times connecting with each other digitally rather than face to face. Club memberships, whether a book club, a writing group, a community clean up task force, a running club, a wine club or a gardening club, are just a handful of opportunities that are available for people to connect with others that they might not otherwise have the chance to meet. Even if socializing is not foremost on your priority list, connecting with others who have similar interests can help feed the curiosity that drives those interests in the first place. It’s a way to learn new ways of looking at the things that propel us forward and, in the meantime, we might just make a new friend.
As the garden center gets busier, I enjoy witnessing the spontaneous meetups of people who have been away for the winter or have been staying home more often during the dark and cold months of winter. I would encourage all of our customers to compare their garden plans with fellow gardeners, commiserate about our collective frustration with deer or tell each other about the birds they may hope to attract to their plot this season. You don’t have to be an expert gardener to connect with someone over plants. You just have to have a certain level of curiosity, an ability to ask “why” and a willingness to take a chance in order to call yourself a gardener.