The Home Garden and the World Outside the Door

The Home Garden and the World Outside the Door

The Formative Home is not a theme about staying in. The garden and the yard belong to the home too, and they build the same habits as the kitchen table: attention, patience, and wonder at the world God made. In Houston, fall is planting season, so this is a good month to begin. Cool-weather vegetables like lettuce, spinach, radishes, and carrots can go in now, and there is still time to sow bluebonnet seeds in a sunny spot for spring flowers (how to grow them →). Even one pot on the porch gives children something to tend, measure, and sketch each week, and TWA’s free Lesson Portal → has lessons on Texas land, water, and wildlife to go alongside.

The first work God gave man was a garden: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Tilling and keeping are still good work for children. A seed teaches them to wait, a plant teaches them to remember it every day, and a bed of vegetables teaches them that care comes before any harvest.

Learning to look. Venite ad Me, the Vatican’s new reflection on handing on the faith, notes that Christ’s preaching drew again and again on “the world of trees, plants and flowers,” and describes him as a man who “looks” attentively at creation and invites everyone to look with the same gaze (no. 15). A child who has watched a seed come up hears the parables of the sower and the mustard seed differently.

One painting. In the 1870s Monet painted the garden of the house he rented in Argenteuil, outside Paris, several times. In The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias) (1873), flowers crowd the foreground, the white house with blue shutters stands behind them, and a couple walks along the fence toward the world beyond. The house, the garden, and the wider world share one frame, and that is the shape of this month’s theme (view it at the National Gallery of Art →).

Where to begin. A few good starting points:

A pot or a small bed. Radishes come up within a week and are ready in about a month, which suits young children who want to see results.

A patch of bluebonnets. Scatter the seed in full sun before the end of November, press it into the soil, and water it in. The seedlings grow through the winter and bloom from late March into May.

A nature table. Give the children one shelf or windowsill for what they bring home: acorns, seed pods, pinecones, an interesting stone. Change it with the seasons, the way the prayer corner changes with the liturgical year.

A weekly walk. Take the same short route each week and keep a simple journal along it. John Muir Laws’s three prompts work at every age: I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of (Nature Journal Club →). The same habits travel well to the city’s larger gardens, such as the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center in Memorial Park and Mercer Botanic Gardens in Humble.

Then hand it over. Give each child something of his own to keep: one pot, one row, the job of filling the bird feeder. A child responsible for a living thing practices faithfulness in small matters, and the plant shows him plainly whether he kept it.

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.” (Psalm 104:24)

This week’s challenge: plant one thing with your children, then walk the same route each week this month and let them tell you what changed.

Next, the theme comes back inside, to the table as the center of family life.