The Unlikely Gardener

Ever curious to see how people are using their creativity to grow food in whatever space they have available, I did a double-take when I passed this big white house in Clarksville this week. In fact, I turned around and went back to investigate. I was intrigued with the tiny but exceptionally tidy little garden (complete with a rabbit fence around it) planted in the front yard right between the front porch and the street.

There was no backyard. The front walk way leading to the porch steps split the garden into symmetrical halves. The wooden stakes held the tomatoes at attention. Bright green heads of lettuce poked up in neat little rows like sentries in front of the tomatoes.

Originally I had assumed that the family who lived there must have just had an ingenious way of producing food, making the best use of the front yard to do so. But as I approached the house, I saw that it was divided into different doors with metal numbers on them. An apartment complex, maybe?

Upon closer inspection, I noticed with puzzlement that the somewhat dilapidated exterior of the house did not seem coherent with the obvious care of the immaculate little garden without a single weed in sight.

There was no activity from either side of the road and no vehicles in the driveway. “What am I looking at?” I mused silently. “What is the story here?”

Later I inquired about the place to a local friend. At first she didn’t know of what property I spoke, until I showed her a photo.

“Oh,” she said, “That’s a shelter for homeless people.”

“But who planted the garden and who tends it?” I asked, astonished at this bit of unexpected news. She explained that the garden was planted and is kept by one of the residents who lives there.

My own gardening journey began during the height of the pandemic and social movements here in the United States, in a time when it felt like the world as I had known it had flipped completely upside down. Growing food and stewarding the land served to root me in the present and became a place of solace, a healing space to connect to the plants, the soil, and the local ecosystem living all around me. I discovered that gardens feed our bodies but they also nurture our souls.

Had I stumbled upon another human being whose world had shifted underneath him in perhaps a different way than mine but that had capsized nonetheless? A fellow sojourner who, in the midst of chaos, had found a way to stay rooted in the present goodness of life?

To order one small space with care and intention while everything else around him raged out of control like a wild fire?

Maybe that is the story here. Maybe it’s the universal story of the power of human dignity to develop resilience in the face of overwhelming adversity.

I hope so. I hope that little well-kept garden connects that man to the good things from his past that he may have forgotten. I hope it nurtures his soul and grounds him in the present. I hope it inspires hope in everyone living there.

And ultimately, I hope it instructs him in the gentle ways of the Creator, the Giver of Life, the only One who can sustain him.