WHAT I'VE LEARNED

A closing contemplation on what nature tries to teach us

- JEFF COX

NOW I STAND before gardens and nature's wild placwes as I did as a seven-year-old facing my elementary school teachers. They seemed to know everything. I knew very little.

Over the years, I absorbed most of what was in the syllabus. But though I've spent a lifetime gardening and marveling at the diversity and inventiveness of the vegetative world, I sense that its vast treasure house of knowledge remains mostly closed to me and its deepest meanings still whiz quickly over my head. And so, in this last installment of this 2022 series of columns on what I've learned about myself from the world of nature, I'm going to try to catch a whizzing deep meaning. Follow along, and see if you agree.

First, when I was a very young child of about four, the plants in our neighborhood's Victory Garden lit up that primal sense of taste. Mr. Gibbs's strawberry patch had several rows, each about 25 feet long. With a couple of my cohorts from our street I would lay down in the rows and do the low crawl along their length, cramming ourselves full of berries as we went. What a revelation of flavor they were: sun-warmed, wonderfully sweet, rich in that scented strawberry flavor. It all went well until Mr. Gibbs spied a tousled head or short-pantsed backside sticking up and then he'd tear out of his house in a fury. We'd screech and run back through the foundation plantings of our suburban houses to safety.