“We live in a divided society. We live inside climate change, ecosystem loss, mass extinction, and racial violence, in a global community gripped by famine, hunger, and war. The heaviest days are excruciating. Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth . . . can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-giving energy we need to go on.”
The above excerpt from editor/poet Tess Taylor’s introductory essay, “Gardening in Public,” captures what it means to garden in these times. Reading this anthology is an immersion in a source of positive energy that is accessible to all of us, whether we tend a single plant or manage a production garden. Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them collects the experiences of ninety poets, testifying for gardening and its potential for renewal. As Mariana Goycoechea’s mother says in “Palm Sunday:” “La luna renews itself / & so can you.” In the depths of the pandemic, Taylor observed that as she tended the garden, it tended back. And being outside, in pickup conversations with neighbors, she saw “how gardens help us nourish both the soil and one another.”
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