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The hardest thing my garden taught me was how to say goodbye only to rediscover it somewhere else in a totally unexpected way. My garden also taught me a whole lot more. This is the story of a garden I had kept for three years, what it taught me, how it taught me all the things it did and why the lessons were hard. In learning from my garden, one of the greatest things I learned was that the garden only teaches if you want to learn from it, but this is about the hard garden lessons not the easy ones.

WHAT MY GARDEN TAUGHT ME:

* My first lesson was to think with a quietened mind and become a part of my environment naturally.

For me, the activities of cultivating, planting, watering, sowing, raking, fertilizing etc. not only taught me about caring for something other than myself, but taught me about myself for it was in the silence of a quitened mind that the questions that perplex me most emerged to the forefront of my psyche. On other days, my mind was completely blank as I toiled away without awareness of time and fully emersed in the moment.

* My second lesson was how much work was involved in maintaining a garden.

Over time my garden allowed me to become aware of small answers that were obtained over a few gardening sessions, but the biggest lesson of all came from the cumulative experience which took a lot of labor, love, patience and know how. Learning how to maintain a garden is hard in and of itself.

* My third lesson was that I have a lot more to learn about gardening.

I am only in the infancy of my gardening career and have much to learn from gardens past, present and future, and it probably has many more lessons to teach me. As a second a year gardener my first season as a gardener was successful having cultivated 400 square feet into a bounty of fruit and vegetables lasting almost a year. In my third year of gardening, my garden was 700-900 square feet and I experimented with flowers and landscaping.

* My fourth lesson was learning how to say goodbye only to find I never did.

Eventually the time to say goodbye to my garden came and as I picked my last harvest of beans, mowed for the last time, saw the last blooms of fall I knew the garden would return. Only the next time, that same garden would be teaching new lessons to someone other than myself. Saying goodbye to that garden was hard to do, but I know its ground is still yielding, its ethos still changing, and its students still learning. In saying goodbye, I learned not just that the garden lives on and

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