Garden Yoga

"Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow." 

- Abraham Lincoln

Thistle is a scourge. An uncontrollable parasitic pandemic. A gardening nightmare. I hate thistle.

And yet, every year, like a great 19th Century American president, I try to put aside my awareness that the network of thistle roots underneath the ground is exponentially larger than the hundreds of thorny green shoots popping up around every plant in my garden. With my trowel and clippers, I snip and hack at every piece of thistle I can find, in the hope that I'll tire it out and win a longer war of attrition.

During my first four-hour thistle busting session this spring, the bending and kneeling was easier if I thought of it as exercise rather than a battle. Yoga was a much more pleasant image.

See for yourself. There's the "Downward: Facing Thistle" pose.

The next day, I applied the yoga re-frame to more garden chores. The posture for pruning:

And planting snap peas:

In my exuberance for planting last week, I also sowed sunflower seeds when the temperature was 80 degrees. Tonight, as it dips into the '20's, I'm going to hope that I won't be witnessing my plants doing their own yoga: the corpse pose.