A Garden Story About Self Trust

We use a struggling shade plant as a mirror for the moments we stop trusting our own eyes and instincts. We connect gardening lessons to burnout, identity, and the relief that comes from changing the environment instead of blaming ourselves.
• noticing a mismatch between assumptions and reality
• a pulmonaria story that shows how conditions drive outcomes
• “believe what you’re seeing” as a self-trust practice
• asking “what else could be true?” when things do not add up
• how big changes can quietly erase the “shade” we need
• why struggling does not mean you are broken
• choosing the right environment so you can truly thrive

Find my book, Nature Knows: Grow and Thrive through the Wisdom of Plants, on Amazon HERE.

Transcript

Spring Garden Mindset

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So, of course, plants have been on my mind a lot because it's um when I'm recording this, it's May 31st, so tomorrow is the first day of June. So we are in one of my favorite times of year. Spring is my very favorite, but if we're talking about perennials and things starting to bloom that are more the traditional perennials, like around here, that would be Minarda, which is bee balm, echinacea, my clematis is soon going to be blooming, although a lot of times they can bloom earlier. All that to say, I'm working on my new garden and plants are very much on my mind. And of course, my book is on my mind because I'm doing a lot of events now, a lot of book signings talking about it. So I'm really immersed in that. And I think in analogies anyway, um, but I think because right now I'm so tuned in to my garden it in nature, it's sort of been on overdrive. So there's something that happened in the last couple weeks, and it reminded me so much of something I talk about in my book,

The Shade Plant That Fails

Mary 1:17

and I talk about on this podcast. And it's believing your instincts or sort of believing what you know to be true. So let me tell you what happened, and it's a story about a plant. So the garden that I have now, it's very tiny. And when I looked at the pictures before we bought the house, I saw basically all shade plants. And when we moved in and things started to come up, I'm like, oh, these are all things that you would plant in the shade. And I didn't spend a whole lot of time initially looking at how much sun the garden was getting. But as I've been here for a few weeks, I started to realize that there's a lot more sun on certain parts of the garden than I thought there would be. And what that means is the plants that had been there were really struggling and it didn't make sense to me. And a lot of the plants that I bought, well, the a lot of the plants that I brought from my other house were shade plants, and I even bought a few. So one of my very favorites for the shade is called Pulmonaria. And around here, the common name is Lung Ward, which is not a very attractive name, but so the leaves on the plant, at least this variety, are a very deep green, and it looks like somebody took um a paintbrush that had had white paint on, but you kind of rinsed it so it was that milky white color and kind of like just flicked the brush because there's little spots, little light white spots all over the leaves. But the flowers are just phenomenal. They are deep, deep pink and purple. There's two varieties. So this was one of my most favorite plants in the shade. So I bring it here and I plant it, and it's not doing well. It's struggling. It's it really looks like it's ready to die. And I'm thinking, I don't understand this. It's a shade garden. Yeah, there's a little bit of sun. So I put a lawn chair over it, and I moved it a little farther towards what seemed to be a shadier part of the garden. Didn't really help. And finally, I'm like, okay, I got the I have to put this fully in a shady corner where it doesn't get any sun. So I move it there, the leaves start to, new growth starts to happen. I cut off all the old growth. It actually looks phenomenal right now. So I'm still thinking, I don't understand why I'm putting so many sun plants in this garden. It's a shade garden. I wasn't believing what I was seeing. What I saw in the pictures, the plants that had already been there, it wasn't making sense to me. So I kept doing what I thought I was supposed to do.

The Missing Clue Behind The Sun

Mary 4:34

So today I'm having a conversation with my neighbor. I had not met them yet. And we have a privacy fence. So we're both standing on lawn chairs, so we can see each other, and we're talking over the fence. And she starts talking about this tree that they cut down last year, and she so shows me this stump, and it's right in the corner that would have shaded this spot where this plant was growing. And the irony of that, so here's here's the conclusion I draw from that. I wasn't believing my eyes. I had it in my head that this is a shade garden and these are the plants that should grow there. And when they struggled, or it seemed like there was more sun than there should be, I just kept assuming I'm doing something wrong. I didn't have the information that there was a big change. And so the first part, the first lesson, I think, is that believe what you're seeing. And I've said this before on other episodes, what else could be true? Because the pictures I saw before we moved and what was happening in the garden, they weren't matching up. And I think sometimes in life, somebody tells us their opinion of something. And instead of trusting what we're seeing, we try to fit what we're experiencing into their definition of reality. I think we do this a lot of times when we deny what we know about ourselves. You know, if somebody when we're young says you're not good at that thing, you're not a good writer, you're not a good singer, you don't communicate well, you're not smart. We can have this sense that actually I am good at those things, or I can be good at those things if I put my mind to it. But instead of believing what we truly know, we keep trying to fit a reality that someone else has shown us, even if it's not making sense. And the other part of that, and this is I dedicate a whole chapter to this,

Stop Blaming Yourself For Change

Mary 6:52

is when something changes in our lives, we sometimes try to keep going. So for the plants that were here when I moved in, a lot of them need shade. Well, the tree was cut down. So in our lives, if we need some cool disconnection, and I talk about shade as being more introverted, if you need that coolness, a little bit of distance, not quite that intensity of connection sometimes, and something in your environment shifts, it can be a quite a shock. And we can try to continue to adapt to it, but sometimes we don't realize like it's killing us. And that happened in the job that I left. You know, there was a huge change there, and the environment went from very supportive and a lot of trust to something that was very hot and intense and mistrustful, and a lot of things were blown out of proportion, or frankly, just lied about. Start to look at what might have changed because the whole point of my book, Nature Knows, is that you are not broken, nothing is wrong with you. It's about what's happening in your environment. Because when a plant is not growing, so this plant, this pulmonaria that I planted, it was on death's door. And I didn't think, oh man, it's just not adapting. I thought about, first of all, it had been dug up two counties away. It had been replanted after it sat in a pot for three weeks. It was a whole different soil. And for some crazy reason that I recognized later, there was a lot more sun. And so I think if we're in that situation, we can start to think, oh, I'm not trying hard enough, or what's wrong with me? Why can't I just adapt to this? When we would never say that about that poor pulmonaria. Like my first thought is, I got to put a lawn chair over that thing because it is, it is getting fried in the sun. And I need to move it to an environment that has what it needs to thrive. And sure enough, it's coming back. It looks great. But had I ignored that, or if we ignore that for ourselves, then we are in a situation where we either can't recover to our former self, or we can maybe continue to grow, but we'll never really thrive because we don't have all the things that we need for our essential nature. So that is how my mind works when I'm in the garden. I'm these analogies are like continual. But like I said, I'm really in this place now where I am loving talking to people about my book and hearing the impact it has.

Reflect On Where You Can Thrive

Mary 10:17

If you love plants and you want a different way of thinking about how to make your life feel more fulfilling, I think you will really love it. It's a beautiful book. You can find it at the in the link in the show notes. It's on Amazon. Um, you can just search for Nature Knows, my name Mary Rothwell. So those are my thoughts for today. Go out and look at the plants around you and reflect on your own life. Are there areas where you're not thriving? And could there be something that you need to change in your environment that would help you to find that thriving? And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.