Marc Hamer was “the gardener,” someone who — for a portion of every day, over a profession’s price of years — knelt for hire, often pulling weeds.
He knew that his employers in the large house, wine glasses in hand, would look out and see him in his posture of humility and maybe say, “The gardener is here,” as if he were nameless and this was his only purpose on earth. But regardless of.
“It just felt silly to concern myself with the social thing, because I used to be on the market on this beautiful relationship with these other living things that were identical to me,” the English-born Mr. Hamer said the opposite day, speaking from his longtime home in Cardiff, Wales. “It felt like prayer; it felt like I used to be actually humbling myself, bowing to the universe.”
A garden is a place of job, yes. But for anyone with the soul of a gardener — regardless of their level of experience — it is usually something else.
“A garden is at all times a spot of worship, even whether it is a extremely crappy one,” Mr. Hamer, 66, writes in his latest book, “Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens,” his third in only 4 years. No surprise that each monastery has a garden, he points out.
The book is the last volume of a memoir trilogy that began with the 2019 publication of the indie hit “Tips on how to Catch a Mole: Wisdom From a Life Lived in Nature.” (Mr. Hamer has also worked as a contract mole-catcher-for-hire.)
About three years ago, when those knees had had enough, he retired from all of it.
“I used to love kneeling within the garden — it felt like bowing to the world that made me,” he writes in “Spring Rain.” As a gardener, he told me, you “are very much aware that your existence is for a really short time frame, and that you simply are identical to the plants are, rising and blooming, after which fading.”
‘I Am Gardening Me’
Such moments of communion with forces larger than himself proceed, but now in other forms: yoga, meditation, long walks. Or simply sitting in his chair, feet on the window ledge, staring out for an prolonged period and watching the blossoms floating off the branches.
“I’m still gardening, but I’m gardening me,” said Mr. Hamer, whose meditation cushion and yoga mat are sometimes positioned to view the small plot he’s remaking across the Cardiff home where he and his wife, Kate Hamer, a fiction author, have lived for 3 a long time. Yes, he still has at the least a part-time dirt-based practice; he described himself on Instagram recently as “barefoot and grubby.”
“I would like to make this broken garden whole again,” he writes, “because it’s not a useful space anymore, it’s something left over — a museum, a mausoleum that needs to vary in order that I can change too.”
It is a recent chapter in his time on earth, and a recent chapter for a chunk of ground that has been many things. It was a yard for his children to play in, a storage place for his work gear. It has long been the repository of bits of plants someone didn’t want or need that he carried home from jobs, including a lavender bush that has defiantly achieved massive proportions and thrived for 15 years, despite the shady conditions he knows it should hate.
But mostly, he acknowledges, the space has been an afterthought, never receiving the nurturing he gave to the landscape that belonged to Miss Cashmere, the name he assigns his former employer in his books.
“Working as a gardener,” he observed, “you don’t go home after which do your garden. You’re too drained. You go home and go to sleep within the chair.”
All the time a Gardener (If No Longer a Flower)
You’ll be able to take the gardener out of the garden, but …
“Gardening is in my muscle memory and sometimes, after I’m out walking,” Mr. Hamer writes, “I see a stem that needs pruning and absent-mindedly reach for the secateurs that for years hung in a leather holster on my belt each day.”
When, in some on a regular basis exchange, he hears himself say, “I was a gardener,” it startles him to comprehend that he has instinctively invoked the past tense.
“My body can’t do this sort of work anymore,” he writes, “but my mind is all garden: constant bloom and seed and bloom.”
As of late, he said, “I’m taking a look at the dried-out poppy seed heads and seeing me. So that you get that whole memento morireally, don’t you? And that’s a vital aspect, I believe, of a meditative or contemplative lifestyle.”
The Zen of Digging Dahlia Tubers
“Spring Rain” has two primary characters — and yet only one. Half of the essays are in the primary person, the ruminations of the present-day Marc Hamer, gardener in transition.
Once, nevertheless, he was “the boy,” and that earlier aspect of himself appears in the opposite passages, depicted within the third person.
The boy is the kid of a father he calls Indignant Dog, and a distracted mother. At 16, he leaves home for good and lives rough for a time, “sleeping at the sting of the fields like a hedgehog, by rivers like a water sprite, in woodlands like a fox,” Mr. Hamer writes.
The boy had at all times been inquisitive. “Children are designed to work out how the world works in an effort to survive,” he writes. His young self lies on his stomach outdoors, watching the workings of ants, after which looks them up in an old encyclopedia set he has discovered within the shed outside a rented house the family lived in.
“Once I was a baby, I’d open seeds up with my pen knife and see what was inside, and the way they may work — or pine cones,” Mr. Hamer recalled. “In fact, you look into something to seek out what’s in it that makes it work, and there isn’t anything in there that makes it work. Since it’s all of the things together that make it work — it’s impossibly complicated.”
Looking for understanding, we cut it “into smaller and smaller and smaller segments,” he continued. “And at that time, you really destroy the whole thing of what it’s.”
A gardener, and a meditator, were germinating inside him, inseparable and indelible features of the person he would grow to be.
“You can not be a gardener without mindfulness,” he said. “Gardening, meditation: It’s all just about the identical really isn’t it?”
Digging up dahlias requires attention, he reminds us, otherwise you’ll pierce the tubers.
“It’s not dreamy in any respect, really,” he said. “It’s focused attention, a sort of single-pointed meditation, really, an exercise in mindfulness in a quite simple sort of way. That is the definition of mindfulness, and it’s a gateway to a deeper meditation.”
May I Have This Dance?
Within the living classroom — or house of worship? — that’s the garden, the entire life lessons are enacted before us. As we rake or weed, each motion is its own type of moving meditation.
Over and again, as things don’t go as planned, we’re challenged to adopt an attitude of nonattachment and to listen to the message of impermanence: Nothing lasts.
We try to be here now (with a nod to Ram Dass, who died in 2019). On that carpe diem theme, Mr. Hamer writes: “All of the flowers’ melancholic fading signals the brevity of life and shouts to me, ‘Blossom while you may, you idiot!’ A mass of complex feelings, yet these blooms know nothing of joy or funerals or lovers’ dresses, they’re merely coagulated genes like us, evolved to survive and pass themselves on.”
It is a wealthy and tender time.
“As I amble across the village where I used to be a gardener for therefore a few years I see the flowers I planted within the little front gardens of people that’ve since died, moved house or simply grown old, and I feel that I even have added love,” he writes.
But he also feels a way of freedom. He recently handed down his lawn mowers. (Although he recalled pondering, “They’re his now, he’s the gardener now; I ponder who I’m,” as he lifted them into the person’s truck.) The old mole van is being replaced with a camper van, higher for trips to France to see his grandchild.
“As a younger person, there at all times seems an urgency, a rush to get on and do the following thing, because you will have this ladder to climb, or this journey to do,” he said. “I do know what the journey is now; I’ve done all that. And I do know what the journey is for me ahead. And since I’ve done all those other things, to me, that feels very liberating. And I’m not afraid.”
If anything, there’s a lightening.
“I feel like I can return and pull out all of the things that I’ve enjoyed in my life, and have a look at them again,” he said. “I dance with my wife.”
He added: “Once I was young, after I was working hard, I used to be too drained to bounce. I never danced. I used to be exhausted. Now, I dance.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the web site and podcast A Strategy to Gardenand a book of the identical name.
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