Amy Baik Lee’s Garden Meditation: The Sacred Ritual of Closing the Garden

November 19, 2021

On this day, author and blogger Amy Baik ["Beck"] Lee captured the bittersweet moment every gardener knows - the annual closing of the garden.

In a post on her blog, Amy described this unscheduled yet inevitable autumn ritual with extraordinary grace.

Amy writes about what she calls "the closing of the garden" - not as the physical act of cleanup, but rather as a profound emotional moment that arrives unexpectedly:

It rarely falls on the actual last day of cleanup, which keeps my hands busy plucking pale winter squashes and cutting vines dusted with powdery mildew into trash bags and pulling bamboo stakes up out of the ground. No, this moment usually arrives earlier...

That day I stood on the third terrace wall, looking for reddening cherry tomatoes in the amber light of the late afternoon, and when I straightened up, I knew.

What makes Amy's reflection particularly touching is her description of the gratitude that wells up during this closing ceremony. She writes:

This closing ceremony had no pomp and circumstance to it, only the same simple prayer that rises every year, as if it is etched into an unseen liturgical book of seasons. As my eye passed over the sweet clusters of sugar star phlox, the words came on their own: 'Thank You.'

Her meditation reminds us that gardening is as much about spiritual growth as it is about growing plants:

This season is closed to the work of sowing and harvesting, but it is the annual commencement of a deeper work of faith: one that is teaching me to trust that the weariness of dead things will be eclipsed by new joy.

Amy's words resonate with every gardener who has stood in their autumn garden, feeling that familiar ache of ending paired with the quiet hope of renewal. Her reflection reminds us that the garden's closure isn't just an ending - it's also a beginning, a time of rest and reflection that prepares both the soil and the soul for spring's return.