Some stowaways hiding in the Classical Roots garden’s patch of thyme.

There’s a famous scene in Thornton Wilder’s stage play Our Town where the central character, Emily, is allowed to look back for a moment on a typical morning from her past life. Bacon is sizzling on the stove, snow is falling outside, and Emily’s family is bustling around, happy and unselfconscious. Filled with longing for this lost simplicity, Emily asks her companion and guide, “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?” He replies: “No. Saints and poets, maybe…”

Presumably, Emily’s guide mentions saints and poets because both these groups tend live with an intense consciousness of the present moment. And at the risk of messing up a great line in a great play, I’d like to add gardeners to that list, because observation is the soul of gardening.

Any gardener knows the power and importance of observation. No amount of reading, watering, fertilizer, or know-how can match the dividends paid by simply walking around a garden and looking around. Often enough, we’re drawn into the garden because it’s relaxing. But, inevitably, we notice a climber that needs training, a tomato vine that needs the suckers pruned off, or a zucchini that has grown overnight from nothing to the size of a baseball bat. It’s for this reason that, after a season or two, most gardeners instinctively reach of a pair of pruners when they head out for a walk: it’s through observation that we learn what each plant needs and it’s best to be able to tend to those needs in situ.

I’ve taken many, many walks in the school’s new orchard since we planted it this past spring. After all, the summer after planting a new tree is the most vital time to be involved: each one needs a good, deep weekly watering and is otherwise vulnerable in a thousand little ways. And even though this exceptionally rainy summer has made the burden of watering our new trees mercifully light, I’ve also wanted to keep an eye on the wildflowers that we sewed among the grass in the field where the trees now stand.

A blue skimmer dragonfly perches on an apple tree’s stake in the orchard.

Though we allowed that grass to grow long this year, even a meadow needs to be cut at least annually. I held off on that mowing for as long as I could, hoping to allow as many as possible of the thousands of native New England wildflowers we sewed to take root while the summer sunshine lasted. Yet, by early September, only the Black-Eyed Susans seemed to have had the tenacity to compete with the cite’s aggressive non-native grass. Feeling it was time to cut losses and move on, I arranged with our Head of School to have the orchard mowed around the beginning of October.

Just days after making those arrangements, I found myself wandering the orchard again, vaguely intent on checking the trees for fungal problems and cutting a few Black-Eyed Susans to pot up in my classroom. It was a crisp morning and the sun was golden among the grassy seed-heads that rumpled in an otherwise imperceptible breeze. Pruners in hand, I bent down to cut a few flowers, and it was only then that I saw them: half a dozen lime-green plants thrusting their leaves through the topmost layer of grass. Wildflowers—many varieties of them. I straightened up and looked across the open space again, adjusting my eyes.

The first Susans coming up in late July.

And there they were: thousands of lupines, bergamots, zinnias, pea blossoms, coneflowers; none of them opening just yet, and each one just breaking through the grass. They’d been there all season long, gathering strength and slowly growing. Instantly, I went to the head of school and asked to have the mowing date shifted to November. If I hadn’t taken my walk that morning, they would all have been cut down too early to establish roots.

This was, of course, a victory. But beyond practical benefits like these, gardening—and the quiet, observational posture it encourages—crafts us into people who are just that much saintlier because, at its roots, saintliness is about seeing: well and truly seeing the world and the people in it, with an eye for how we can help them grow.