NATURE Poem: Gardener in the Wind, by A.C. Blake

My garden is a wild tangle of intention and accident—a soft rebellion blooming between the clipped borders of my neighborhood. It’s a quiet refusal to control what was never meant to be tamed. Here, amidst the milkweed and dandelions, I began tending not just soil, but something unkempt and yearning inside myself.

One afternoon, while pressing a hand-painted sign into the warm soil beside a patch of clover, my neighbor, Mr. Thompson, leaned over the fence.

“You know,” he called, half teasing, “I always thought you didn’t have a green thumb.”

I smiled and glanced around—dandelions flickering like tiny suns among the leaves.

“Maybe not for proper gardens,” I said, brushing dirt from my hands. “But for this kind? I do just fine.”

He stepped closer, eyes catching the words on my signs. Milkweed – Monarch butterfly haven. Dandelions – Not just weeds, but tea for the soul. His brow furrowed, then softened. “Never thought of it like that.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “We’re so busy trimming and taming nature into what we think it
should be, we miss the beauty in simply letting it be. Dandelion tea is my favorite. It’s like
sipping a bit of the garden’s spirit.”

Peaches, my ginger cat, strolled out from the undergrowth, her tail held high. She moved like a whisper through the clover and herbs, perfectly at home. A creature born for freedom. “She seems to like it,” he said, watching her with new eyes.

“She does. Cats remember something we tend to forget—the grace of not being controlled.” He didn’t speak for a moment, just nodded slowly.

“Maybe there’s something to that. Letting things be…”

Then a sudden rustle—a young deer darted across the path, chasing a butterfly that spun like a drifting seed. Mr. Thompson gasped, caught off guard.

“Never seen that in my yard,” he murmured.

The garden exhaled around us—mint, jasmine, the grounding scent of dandelion roots. The sun’s heat loosened its grip, and the breeze began to cool like a sigh. Birds tuned the hush with their evening songs, and the leaves joined in with their own kind of applause.

Later, as I watered the ferns, his words lingered. Each plant in my garden, from the humble dandelion to the defiant milkweed, whispered a truth I’d come to cherish: you don’t have to be tamed to be beautiful.

I used to believe I was a poor gardener—because I couldn’t shape roses or train vines. But it wasn’t my garden that was wrong. I just hadn’t yet learned what kind of garden was right for me. As the sun lowered itself behind the trees, casting long amber shadows across the uneven beds, I sank onto my old bench. Peaches curled beside me with a sigh, her purring folding into the quiet around us. The garden hummed—not neat, not silent, but alive in all the right ways.

This isn’t just gardening. It’s rewilding—of soil, of soul. A quiet revolt against control, and a return to something truer, older, mine.