The year I needed my garden most
2024 was a hard year, but also a beautiful one
I meant to do a little plant-by-plant recap of this last growing year, but I think that it can wait until I start getting seed catalogs in the mail and begin to plan the 2025 garden. My brain isn’t there yet. Right now it’s way more interested in checking out all the new flower seeds coming out than it is in deciding whether or not to keep growing the scabiosas that aren’t really loving living in pots on the terrace. Also, my brain is still too holiday-foggy to be making such very important decisions, so they will have to wait.
But my brain is always happy to reminisce, and I can’t pass up an opportunity to dig back into photos of the garden during prettier times. During these winter months I forget that outdoor flowers are even possible.
I promise not to go into the whole story or anything (that’s what my rambling About section is for!) but for those of you who are new here, my husband and dog and I moved to Brooklyn at the end of 2023 into an apartment with a terrace that was just waiting to be gardened upon. It came with a few small raised beds, and even better, walls painted a faded pink and blue and white: perfect backdrops for the cottage garden style flowers I wanted to grow.
The garden started small, and grew and grew, thanks mainly to too many visits to the Union Square Greenmarket and also to all of the pots and containers I’d find for free on front stoops. I sowed seeds indoors and put the tiny plants under lights on a tiny shelf in our room until they were large enough to kick out and harden off in plastic bin cold frames, and amazingly I didn’t run out of room or make too much of a mess in our apartment.
And it all grew better than I thought it would. My expectations were low, I think. It was my first time growing a real garden in containers, and going from gardening in a backyard in Portland, Oregon to growing in pots in Brooklyn, I did have some snobbish ideas of what a ‘proper garden’ looked like. I knew that I wanted to grow the same flowers that I’d grown before. In practice, sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn’t. You’d be surprised at how well dahlias, for instance, can do in a grow bag, and the zinnias were perfectly happy in containers up until the rains and powdery mildew came, and my two-year-old Carding Mill rose put on so much growth in its big plastic pot from Lowe’s that I can’t imagine how large it might get if I ever have a bit of ground to plant it in. Not everything loved container-living, though, and I really do need to write up that plant recap post, because, yes, the scabiosas looked sad.
The main gardening lesson I learned this last year? To stop being such a snob. To see containers gardens for the ‘proper gardens’ they are, because, really, I’ve probably never put in so much effort and grew so many varieties of plants as I did this year on our little city terrace—not even when I was gardening on a quarter of an acre in Oregon.
I also learned to stop seeing growing in containers as a limitation, and part of this comes from living in a place like Brooklyn, where people don’t let living amongst so much brick and concrete stop them from planting beautiful things, whether they grow flowers in window boxes or in pots on front stoops or in tree wells, guerrilla-style.
Sometimes the container itself can add to the beauty of a garden (I got a few Bergs pots for Christmas and am already planning what to put in them this spring), and sometimes it’s the combination of a lovely pot and a container-happy plant that is the real beauty. The determination I’d had to grow only cut flowers faded away this year when I saw just how charming small flowering plants can look in pots. Nemesia, violas, sweet alyssum, linaria, lobelia—some of the plants grown from seed, but most of them picked up at bodegas or the Greenmarket whenever I had a pot vacancy to fill. Those types of plants aways seemed boring to me, but now I can’t wait to grow more.
2024 in the garden was a dream, even when it wasn’t. In late summer it rained too much, and in early fall it didn’t rain nearly enough, but the garden held on because I coddled it, desperate to keep it alive. Because in a lot of other ways 2024 was hard. My dad died in June, and when I look back at blog posts from around that time I’m surprised by how much work and thought and emotion I was putting into the garden. I guess it was my escape—not a bad one as far as escapes go, but dropping seeds in the ground (or pots) and watching them grow into plants that made flowers was the kind of magic I needed at the time. A distraction, for sure, but maybe I needed that at the time, too?
Right now it’s dark and cold outside, and even though the paperwhites and amaryllis are blooming inside, it’s not enough distraction and not enough magic to keep the sadness at bay. But that’s probably ok, too. Not saying my Trader Joe’s amaryllis isn’t pretty, though!
I thought that grief might make me care less about the garden, but it ended up doing the opposite. It made me fragile and open; and beauty—especially beauty in nature—became more important to me than ever. My dad loved growing flowers, too (especially dahlias), and how wonderful it is to have a hobby that makes me think of him—and maybe not really such a distraction after all.
This is such a beautiful post - so glad your garden brought you some respite during such a difficult year. Putting energy into helping something else thrive is such a good way to get out of your own head, even for a few moments. Excited to see what your 2025 garden plans will look like! Btw, I have a ton of sweet pea seeds if you'd like any for the spring. :)
It was wonderful to follow along with your garden experiments and arrangements this year, Rhiannon. Thank you so much for sharing it with all of us. I'm so glad it brings you such solace.