Reflecting on Perfection

Learning to Farm Flowers

And to Love Imperfection…

I have long existed within the walls of perfectionism. I can recall being 5 years old and weeping over one of my drawings because the image on the paper did not match the photographic image of it in my mind. I often was too embarrassed to try or participate in things with which I was unfamiliar or in which I did not naturally excel. 

I started growing flowers 6 years ago, beginning with a pollinator garden in my back yard. I grew seedlings in tiny Styrofoam cups in a sunny window without any lights. They stretched and struggled, the better half of them died before they left the house.  I planted the ones that survived in a small corner of my tiny yard sheltered by a fence and a wall of the garage. The garden that grew was far from the immaculate image I had planned, but it brought bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds to my yard. And much joy. 

My first small garden sent me down the rabbit hole of desire to grow and design with my own cut flowers. The first year I devoured information, read books, took a very popular and romantic online course about flower farming, and built raised beds in my back yard. I grew a few nice flowers, and in my daydreaming managed to painstakingly overcomplicate every next step. A topic for another post, one should not plan every step of a flower-growing empire without putting shovel to soil, lest she find herself with unworkable heavy clay in a town devoid of compost. The back yard flooded later that year, washing much of the soil away. The following year, the back yard was no longer my own, and I grew in plastic bulb crates on a concrete shuffleboard pad in a rental down the street. The next year, in my 4th season of growing cut flowers, the pandemic meant another move and a new garden. My partner and I set down roots and mapped out our first market garden.  Most of the seedlings I started that year didn’t make it. A fair number of the seeds I sowed never germinated. But there were flowers. And joy. 

I have not naturally excelled at growing flowers. Some of the more glaring errors I have made along the way have been humbling. I have learned to slow down my noisy brain that has previously had me paralyzed with over-analysis. My gardens will always have weeds. Some plants will die. There will be bugs. But if it weren’t for trying, I would miss all of the beauty. 

The glass is not half empty. It is waiting for flowers to be put in it.