While you’re waiting for post-pandemic life to resume, try growing something

This spring, hope is forcing its way to the surface along with new life. But for many, there will still be a monthslong lag between the promise of a coronavirus vaccine and its arrival. And for everyone, normal, or something to replace it, remains a long way off.

After a year in quarantine, home seems familiar to the point of exhaustion. But whereas, last year, the cherry trees forming a frothy pink arch over an entire city block offered a terrible, ironic contrast to the refrigerated trucks providing overflow capacity for morgues, my garden feels like the bridge that will carry me through the pandemic’s final weeks and months. If routine activities are slow to resume outside my fence, I can still foster an explosion of new life inside it.

I know I’m not alone – and I invite any reluctant or space-pressed gardeners to join our numbers. Prolonged isolation inspired a renovation boom for those who could afford to reimagine their private spaces. But no new deck or finished basement inspires quite the same awe as something emerging from nothing – be it a bloom finally opening up from a coddled houseplant or a bulb planted last winter breaking through soil in search of sun. The former might run as little as $20, while the packet of moss rose seeds I ordered, hoping to delight my toddler, cost $3.85. I’m excited to see how many saucy, ombre blossoms I can coax from a $6.95 dahlia tuber.

And while the idea of using all this enforced free time in lockdown to learn a new skill is, at this point, rather old, the particular knowledge required for good plant care has a nicely meditative quality.

I know things about the quality and acidity of my soil and the places rain collects that I might never have noticed if I wasn’t paying attention to an unhappy group of azaleas or trying to cultivate a patch of Creeping Jenny. The former will be getting a revitalizing dose of acidic fertilizer, while water that pools in a corner of the patio feeds the latter. Even taking care of a single houseplant involves a closer acquaintance with your own space, whether you’re blessed with prodigious morning light in your office or trying to find the right schedule for watering a tropical plant in air that didn’t previously feel dry.

As an activity, outdoor gardening also has the advantage of being mentally and physically distracting in excellent proportion to one another. Take weeding. Not only do you have to bend down, but if you don’t grasp and yank an invader properly, you may end up without the roots, leaving the problem to trouble you another day. Calling such chores mindless is the point: Weeding, raking, watering and other mundane garden tasks require just enough precision and effort to keep worries in their place for an hour or so.

That sort of distraction is a particular balm when the world is the way it is right now. None of us can go back in time and design a national vaccine rollout strategy. But our accumulated nervous energy goes nicely toward filling a bag with dandelion taproots and other invasive ephemera.

Above all, gardening is a great lesson in resilience, which is to say, both the inevitability of failure and the new opportunities that lie beyond each minor disaster. I am currently killing a miniature rose bush in a pot that already claimed the life of an orchid this winter. I told myself that the lack of drainage that sent the orchid to its death could be remedied by a layer of rocks and horticultural charcoal this time around. But just because hope springs eternal doesn’t mean plants will. As the last year has demonstrated, some losses can’t be healed with a vase full of homegrown flowers.

As the late Washington Post gardening columnist Henry Mitchell wrote, disappointment and delight are often twinned.

“We all know by now that as irises and roses and peonies reach a great climax we are likely to have a storm so severe it batters flower stalks and blooms to nothing. So we are braced for it,” he reminded readers. “And then there will come a day in which things we do not expect all bloom together and the light is of some curious quality and all things take on a glow and richness that transfigures them.”

When that transformation comes for the world at large, we won’t forget the shattering days that preceded it. But at least we can start enriching the soil in our own gardens, in hopes our exhaustion and despair can someday feed something beautiful.