Two months ago, I shared a column about a special trip to Paris to visit my daughter, Olivia. Together, we spent a memorable day exploring a local nursery and filling her terrace with flowers, vegetables, and herbs. I happily introduced her to the joys of gardening— a passion I never imagined she’d one day embrace.
What I didn’t fully realize at the time was just how much that experience would come to mean to her. Today, I’m stepping aside and handing this space to Olivia, who wanted to share the deeply personal story behind that visit and how a garden became an unexpected source of healing. I hope you’ll enjoy her perspective as much as I have. — Laura McLean.
When I was young, the last thing I wanted was to get dirt under my fingernails. I preferred to get them painted, their main uses to tear open the packaging of freshly purchased Blu-rays or type on a glowing Apple product. I was an indoor cat at heart — migrating from home to car to classroom without a scratch or sunburn, although with what I’m assuming was a major vitamin D deficiency.
My mom is famously an outdoor cat. She scratches at the screen to be let out, leaps into her garden, and prowls her yard. She could spend hours and hours digging, planting and pruning; it’s her highest meditative state. I would observe her from an indoor vista, like a pallid evil queen watching over the merry princess frolicking in the sun. How could we be so different? How could she stand the heat, the bugs and, worst of all, the sensation of dirt under her nails? It made my skin crawl. Whenever she encouraged my brothers and me to go outside, I would furiously clean every inch of the house — avoiding outdoor tasks by keeping the interior pristine.
Throughout my 20s, I was a murderess of innumerable gifted houseplants. Roommates and friends took an interest in Fiddle-leaf figs to add a dot of green to their Brooklyn apartments, getting on yearslong New York City waitlists for coveted community garden spots, spent half a paycheck on a quaint floral-arranging course. The interest was still alien to me. My 20s now feel like a blurry cycle of work-hard-play-hard cynicism and hedonism, stressful career climbing, and gradually damaging my eyesight behind a computer screen. I released my demons by chasing the night, chasing relationships, avoiding “touching grass” both physically and mentally.
Over the past year, everything changed. My 30s, in general, have been a period of maturation — slowing down, settling down, cherishing nights in and long calls to friends and relatives who I never previously had the patience or appreciation for. And this past year was the first time I ever found myself focused on growing something. A baby, a family. Glowing from inside and out, content that everything was falling into place and excitedly anticipating this next major chapter of life. I had always fought against the idea of maternal ideations, but as soon as I allowed myself to embrace that, this was, in fact, something I really desired; life felt lighter and brighter.
That is, until suddenly and shockingly, the burgeoning blossom withered on the vine.
I oscillated between grief and guilt, moving through a dark abyss of unknowns. Was it my fault? Would I try again? What if it happens again? It was impossible to see the future and catastrophic to dwell on the past. And just as I was about to sink deeper during the darkest days of winter, I happened to scroll across an Instagram reel that was the first of a two-part catharsis — a saccharine, brightly lit segment of Drew Barrymore’s upbeat daytime talk show. She was talking to Kristen Griffith-VanderYacht, a peppy floral designer. Drew and another host were seeking advice on how to keep flowers “alive for as long as possible.”
To which Kristen soulfully replied: “Flowers are not supposed to last. Their job is to help us stay in the present. They grow, they blossom, they thrive, and then they’re gone. You have to stay in the present. You have to be in the moment. Otherwise, you’ll blink, and they’re gonna be gone.”
This made me sit up straight in my bed, which I had been inhabiting like the grandparents from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory while recovering. I immediately sent the post to my mom. She loved it, too. We spoke, caught up, and gradually put in motion plans for her to come visit me in Paris over her April break.
Living in a metropolis, I didn’t have a yard, but I was lucky enough to have a sizable terrace deck. We had moved into the apartment over the winter and already dealt with the task of cleaning out a graveyard of frozen potted plants abandoned in broken plastic containers and, for most of them, serving their final years as giant ashtrays for the previous tenants.
When my mom arrived, instead of the usual indoor cat activities I would propose for our agenda (museums, shopping, restaurants), I insisted we leave the city to head to one of the largest nurseries located on Paris’ periphery. I suddenly had a burning desire for all things green. We threw things into our trolley like a supermarket sweep: innumerable seed packets, pots, a tomato plant, an olive tree, and at my husband’s insistence, a towering bamboo. Not the typical shopping spree you would associate with a Paris holiday, but we loaded and lugged and set to work installing everything up on my terrace.
For me, everything was Gardening 101: preparing the pots with a small layer of rocks for drainage, freeing the plants from their rootbound plastic tubs and placing them nicely in their new homes, situating each plant according to their needs for sun or shade, covering certain seedling pots with plastic bags to encourage faster growth in the shy Spring sunshine.
I certainly got dirt under my fingernails that afternoon. And I loved it.
Over the past four months, I’ve nurtured a constantly growing Eden on my terrace. I can’t express the joy of plucking my own cherry tomatoes, discovering a new flower bursting from one of the window boxes, and the incredible satisfaction that my little patch of green has attracted a daily procession of bees and butterflies and other insect guests (although I could have done without the aphid invasion that killed my Nasturtium). I bookend my days with watering and inspecting my garden, an arguably healthy replacement to starting my mornings in a fret over work emails.
I still harbor hopes to become a mother, but in the meantime, I’m incredibly thankful to have such a guiding light in my own mom to help me through this stage of my life and inspire this late-discovered passion, a healing hobby that’s helped me through a very impossible time.
I don’t know what the next season of my life will bring. But every morning, as I water my little terrace garden, I’m reminded that hope rarely arrives all at once. It begins quietly — in the turning of the soil, the unfurling of a leaf, the promise of something taking root.
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” — Audrey Hepburn