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Healing in the garden: How my garden helped me

Have you ever been devastated by a betrayal that made you literally feel like your world, your life as you know it has come to an end? I have and somehow I managed to survive with the help of my garden.

After six years of friendship, we stopped being in each other's lives several months ago. As soon as spring came I was in my garden. It was a mixed blessing, I had done a lot of gardening with this person, so a glance at my every spreading Virginia Crawler Ivy or the budding of the Quaking Aspen we had planted together brought back an overwhelming sadness. I remembered when he teased me about building a nature sanctuary as we hung several bird feeders and bird houses on the tree branches. As the weeks went on and my heart was not in it, I stopped gardening because it was painful, just too many memories.

One evening I was sitting on my deck overlooking the garden and I realized how dead, how unloved it looked. The perennials were coming up on cue, but the remnants of last year's flowers and bushes were spoiling the look of the garden. Like an epiphany, I realized that I was allowing his betrayal to continue to hurt me and cause damage. I was allowing him to take away the things I loved. Gardening was my love, my baby and I had shared it with him. Why should I allow him to destroy something I had enjoyed before he came into the picture?

That very evening, I got on my hands and knees and began to weed and when images and memories of him and I in my garden began to take shape in my mind's eye, I pushed them away, because this was my baby not his and I wasn't going allow him to hurt me anymore.

I have worked hard to make my weed free garden look beautiful on this day, on the cusp of summer. My Catmint sways in the wind filling the air with the smell of pungent mint, my apple trees are full and lush with no signs of the Japanese Beetles that tried to destroy them last year and the buds on my Day Lilies are forming promising to fill my garden with bursts of yellow and orange flowers in the next few weeks. In reclaiming my garden, I have reclaimed my life and my garden not only helped me; it saved me.

Learn more about this author, R.S. Coke.
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