My mother, a keen gardener, had a depressing habit of basing decisions on what shrubs to plant on their rate of growth relative to her own mortality - as in, “I’ll be dead by the time it reaches the top of the fence". She would laugh heartily as she made these quips, although I found them unsettling and didn’t like to be reminded of her eventual demise in such a flip way. Yet I recently found myself making a similar calculation, as I tracked a Trachycarpus palm’s painfully slow rise over the summer.
The measure of time is indeed something to reckon with - for we might not see the “top of the fence” for everything we ‘plant’. We are planting into a future that we may never fully inhabit - yet it is perhaps in this very awareness that we can find purpose.
The existential philosophers have a thing or two to say about this - although they didn’t put it quite as plainly as my mother did. Martin Heidegger, for example, spoke of being-toward-death - the idea that it is precisely our awareness of mortality that gives our lives urgency and authenticity. Knowing we won’t be here forever calls us back to the present - to what we’re tending today. Similarly, Viktor Frankl reminds us that meaning isn’t something handed to us; it’s something we make in the tension between what we are now and what we are capable of becoming. Between here and the top of the fence, if you will.
The fence is not an ending - it’s a marker reminding us that between the soil and the sky is where our living happens. This is where we make meaning. This is where we nurture our metaphorical garden - knowing that it might bloom beyond our sight. Perhaps the important question is whether we’re tending to what matters. What might you be planting in your life or relationships or work? In acts of kindness or the tiniest daily actions? And if you don’t see them reach full maturity, does that make them pointless - or precious? What blooms might someone see, years from now, because you cared enough to tend the roots today?
If you’re curious about planting something different in your life - you might simply start by noticing what you long for, what feels stuck, or what you wish were different. What feels ready for tending, or what’s been left in the shade too long. Sometimes that noticing alone is the beginning. And if you’re not sure where to begin, that’s okay - most gardens start that way.
I realise now that maybe the point isn’t to see everything come to fruition, but to plant anyway - because between here and the top of the fence is where beauty lies. If something in you is asking for change - however quietly - what might be one small seed you could plant today? Even the tiniest shift counts.