Becoming a Gardener

In the Garden with Andrew

Andrew Bunting. Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

My earliest memory of “wanting to be something when I grow up” was probably when I was five. I wanted to be a zookeeper. That seemed more realistic than playing right field for the Oakland A’s.

We lived in Northern California, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, in Santa Rosa. My mother always kept both a vegetable garden and some flower gardens. Most summers we drove our VW camper van from California to Nebraska and back, taking different routes. My grandfather farmed in southeastern Nebraska, just outside a little town called Belvidere. I loved those couple of weeks on the farm every summer. Something about that agrarian lifestyle resonated with me then, and still does today. I loved the crops in the field, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and the smell of hay. I loved the canned vegetables in the cool cellar and helping to collect eggs. Even today, when I collect my own eggs, I am struck by a visceral flashback triggered by the smell of the straw in the laying boxes in the chicken coop.

From California, we moved to my grandfather’s farm for a couple of years. My dad bought a husky Troy-Bilt rototiller, and we ambitiously turned over part of the alfalfa field and started vegetable gardening with gusto. We grew a lot of everything. We had a bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn. My crop was spaghetti squash, of which we produced hundreds. I loved all aspects of vegetable gardening, from planting to cultivating to weeding and especially harvesting. I still never tire of foraging through leaves in search of the season’s first cucumber or zucchini. 

Like many beginning gardeners, I found growing plants exciting. While the other high school kids were down at the arcade playing Pac Man and Donkey Kong, I was growing seeds under lights in my basement or cultivating endless African violet plants from leaf cuttings. One grow light became two, then three, then four, until most of the basement had become a plant production center. James Crockett’s “Crockett’s Victory Garden” was the gateway to my passion and eventually to my career.

My mom indulged this passion 100%. I am sure she figured gardening was better than any of the potential alternatives a teenage boy might find. Over the summers of 1979-82, I had some part-time jobs, but mainly I gardened. My mother allowed me to turn most of the front yard into a vegetable garden, and soon I began to transform other parts of the yard into a garden as well. My first flowers from seed were red salvia, Salvia splendens; blue salvia, Salvia farinacea; zinnias; and ageratum.

Fortunately, I went to a large high school with a greenhouse and classes like Landscape Management and Greenhouse Management. I joined Future Farmers of America. The Donkey Kong kids waited with bated breath for “MAD Magazine,” while I could not wait for the latest issue of “Organic Gardening.”

A few key people helped nurture my passion. My high school teacher Mr. Whittler lent me his college textbook, “Hartmann and Kester’s Plant Propagation,” which I remember reading with concentration. At the beginning, my mom nurtured my interest, but after a while we began to co-evolve as gardeners together. At some point we abandoned common names, and even today we refer to plants with botanical Latin!

I have always loved gardening’s wide accessibility. Gardening transcends ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and political party. I have seen amazing gardens created in struggling neighborhoods all over the world — gardens whose beauty, artful expression, and diversity of plants rival landscapes created by billionaires. 

I can’t think of a place I have been where people don’t garden. I have seen amazing home gardens high in the mountains above Bogota and in rainforest communities in Madagascar. As an intern at the Chicago Botanical Garden, I saw amazing community gardens in Cabrini Green, a Chicago housing project. In hustling and bustling Hanoi, I saw gardens on nearly every stoop.

I am fortunate that my passion is my profession. Going to work has never felt like working. After “work,” I come home and garden. When I go on vacation, I often seek out gardens to visit around the country and world. I still find as much joy growing an orange zinnia from seed as embarking on plant exploration tours in the wilds of China or Vietnam.

If you aren’t a gardener, but have thought about it, give it a try. Start a vegetable garden for the first time. Think about how you might transform your landscape. Volunteer for an organization like the Swarthmore Horticultural Society or Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Anyone who chooses can become a gardener. 

Send your gardening questions to editor@swarthmorean.com.

Andrew Bunting is vice president of public horticulture at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and vice president of the Swarthmore Horticultural Society.