I killed a bunch of plants, and it saved me.
Many people intentionally take action to better their lives. I was, for a very long time, not one of those people. As such, most of the best things I’ve ever done for myself were entirely accidental: such it was that I started gardening. I was living in Istanbul at the time, and I hated it. I hadn’t always: when I’d first arrived in the city nearly four years prior, its energy thrummed bone-deep and exhilarating. I may have ended every day exhausted by work (I was a preschool teacher, God help me) and the constant stress of trying to communicate in a language I had at best a tenuous grasp on, but it was a fun exhaustion. It was the exhaustion that only a twenty-one-year-old with little experience outside of her suburban hometown can crave. I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to be swept up and made anew. And so it went, for the first three years. But when everyday tasks are a struggle, it’s easy to miss larger warning signs. Looking back, I had been in trouble for months. It wasn’t just the ‘four-year-burnout’ that all the expat websites and forums joked about. Or maybe it was; maybe burning out looks different on different people. For me, it looked like crippling, claustrophobia-induced anxiety.
I grew up in the East Bay Area, where everything is green in abundance and spades. Or at least it used to be, before the droughts and the seemingly never-ending wildfire season. The East Bay of my childhood was green, but of course we were living on borrowed time. Borrowed time and borrowed water. In any event, I took plants for granted because they were everywhere. They were the backdrop against which the events of my life took place, never entering center stage. It may be cliché to say that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but it’s true. Istanbul is a city of at least 16 million people, and when I was living there it was almost astoundingly devoid of green spaces. The few parks that existed were manicured within an inch of their lives and thus resembled poor simulacrums of wildness. If you were to describe a forest to a person who had never laid eyes on one, that person would still likely be able to create a closer likeness than the stark rows of nonnative shrubs flanking overwatered, over-tread expanses of lawn. The handful of trees in my neighborhood that were managing to cling on to life from the confines of cement planters dug into the street deserved metals of bravery like war heroes.
None of this bothered me in the slightest, at first. It seems absurd now, but it really never occurred to me that my life was being diminished, that I was actually being made ill, by a lack of something that had once been so abundant in my life that I had learned to un-see it. Humans may be visual creatures, but we struggle to see most of what is right in front of us. It wasn’t until I began having near-daily panic attacks that I was forced to consider what might be wrong with my life.
At first they felt like anger, a constant, vein-deep coursing of fury that I experienced whenever I was in a crowd (and for those of you who have been to Istanbul before, you know that this is most of the time). It took several months, and the gentle suggestion of a friend, to realize that the anger was a manifestation of panic. I was claustrophobic, particularly in tight crowds of people such as those found in metro stations and on basically every one of the city’s terrifyingly narrow sidewalks. The only place I could breathe was at home, away from people, away from the noise and crush of the streets below. The room I had rented in a blisteringly hot apartment on the city’s famously bustling European side featured a tiny, 4x5 foot balcony. It had a ceramic tiled floor that had probably once been red, but dust and exposure had reduced it to a faintly disturbing dark pink. I had largely ignored the balcony for the first year I’d lived in the apartment. In the second year, the only addition had been a rosebush. I was now in my third year in this apartment, my fourth total in the city, and I was at a point of crisis.
It wasn’t only the panic attacks, although when you’re in a spiral it can be hard to find the exact precipitating factor. Since my early days as an undergraduate student in San Francisco, I had made it my be-all and end-all to become a professor of history. Blithely blowing past numerous warning signs that it was, in fact, not at all the right career path for me, I moved to Istanbul and floored it into what turned out to be a dead-end master’s degree and unanimous rejection from all of the PhD programs to which I had subsequently applied. This is not uncommon; any humanities student will tell you that most people get rejected from everywhere the first time they apply. I knew this, and I was prepared for it. What I wasn’t prepared for was the creeping, insistent realization that I no longer wanted it.
The absolute single and only reason to do a PhD in the humanities, which more often than not requires the sacrifice of financial security and personal relationships and sanity itself, is because you want it more than anything else. I didn’t. Perhaps I never had; perhaps it simply felt good to say that I had a plan that I was working towards, to escape the millennial stereotype of the lost, financially and emotionally burdened soul. Or perhaps I had simply changed my mind. Regardless, it was what I had worked towards for the better half of my twenties. I had been working as an ESL teacher to pay the bills and ending every month near zero. I had no job experience relevant to anything else. And worse, I didn’t even know what I wanted to gain experience in.
There I was, twenty-six and broke, panicking in crowds with no idea which way to move. Every day felt like a choking, gasping attempt to stay above water. My boyfriend, who was at that point truly the only good thing in my life, was nearly begging me to leave the city. “We can manage long-distance, for a while,” he promised me one day in February as I cried (again) into a bowl of lentil soup. When I saw the way he looked at me, I felt scared for myself. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want anything that even remotely resembled my own life. At the very least, I wanted to be proximal to something that was totally unlike myself. Such it was that I began, slowly at first and then in earnest, to fill my balcony with plants.
When I bought the rosebush the previous winter, I stuck it in a corner of the balcony next to the water heater and promptly forgot about it. It survived the winter, and my absolute lack of care for it, through sheer force of will coupled with the good fortune of frequent rain. In early spring I added two succulents, followed by a tiny rosemary start (which I didn’t bother to re-pot) and a hanging basket of violently fuchsia petunias. Finally, with smug dreams of homesteading in an apartment, I bought a packet of tomato seeds. It should be enough of an illustration of how little I knew to say that I have no recollection of what variety they were, or whether they were heirloom or hybrids. Tomatoes were tomatoes. Such it was that I orchestrated an absolute tragicomedy of gardening errors that eventually turned my balcony into a buggy wasteland of gnarled twigs and dirt.
The rosemary was the first casualty. In fairness to myself, it died so quickly that it might actually not have been my fault (I don’t believe I knew at that time how to check for signs that a start was healthy before buying it). But then came the rosebush. It may have survived a neglectful winter, but by summer it was beset with spider mites. Not knowing what they were, I left the problem to develop until it had claimed the lives of my succulents, too. The hanging basket of petunias underwent a torturous regime of over-watering followed by under-watering, until they too finally gave up. The five tomato seeds, which I had planted in a ridiculously small planter box that could not have dreamed of containing enough nutrients to sustain them, somehow managed to hold on the longest. By the time I left the balcony behind once and for all, the tomatoes were still (barely) hanging on.
It’s frightening how much we are capable of forgetting; not only about the world around us, but about ourselves. Attempting (very poorly) to provide the conditions for something else to thrive, something not human, was a step outside of my ego that came as an immense relief. Gardening is like that. It takes you out of yourself. It can sustain you, but it’s not about you. Reading complicated theory, trying to be the smartest in the room, splitting hairs in order to be right about a specific point of one vague argument or another, didn’t matter on my dusty little balcony. Roots mattered. Soil mattered. The unsettling speed at which spider mites can wreak havoc mattered. I had the rare feeling of being both a creator and a bystander; I may have provided the materials, but really, it wasn’t about me at all. I still didn’t know what I was doing with my life. But I knew what I needed.
The death of a flower or a fruit, or even a whole plant, or even a life plan, isn’t really an ending. Under the right conditions, it’s a continuation of a cycle, a necessary step in a complex and eternal process towards something new. I left the apartment behind — nearly all of my plants had all succumbed to the damn spider mites, anyway. I moved back to my hometown, back to the beginning. And the first thing I did was sign up to be a propagation volunteer at the Ruth Bancroft Garden. Systematically doing everything wrong may have been exactly what I needed up until that point, I figured, but it was time to start learning how to do it right.
The previous summer, in a sudden fit of homesickness, I’d thrown a few California poppy seeds in a flower box attached precariously to the rusted balcony railing. They sprouted, grew about an inch, and died. I melodramatically read all sorts of symbolism into their death (but not, somehow, the simple fact that I should have watered them more) and gave up. The flower box sat empty for the winter. Early in the spring, I noticed a few mystery weeds growing up from the neglected soil. Having largely forgotten about the poppies — and having little knowledge then of how resilient seeds are — I attributed it to something a laughing dove or crow had dropped. But still, something kept me from uprooting them. In Istanbul green was green, after all. If I’d known then what I’ve since learned, I would have recognized them earlier. But it wasn’t until the first weed unfurled tangerine colored petals, softer and more delicate than crepe paper, that I understood that they were poppies. As all of my plans and all of my expectations were finally and definitively collapsing, three California poppies reached indifferently towards the sky.
