One afternoon, nearly three years ago now, I visited Yael in her backyard. It had been several months since her accident, a sewer explosion causing a near lethal blow to the head. Her garden had since become a space of healing, a reprieve from the dizzying coordination of daily life. She took me through its landscape, bare feet in tall grass, pointing to bed after bed, each an individual site of contemplation and playful enchantment.
To tend to a garden is a labourious task, and Yael undertook to do it joyfully. Over two summers, she bore witness to the cycles of decay and growth, attentive to the ways in which these states mirrored her own regeneration. Roots grew beneath the soil as synapses rejoined, growth suspended in the underbelly of her backyard. Only through digging, through the turning of the earth, the skin of each season’s beginning, did its progress become apparent. I still recall a moment bending down to fold my nose between flower blossoms, Yael towering over me as the relentless sun beat down on her, still blind to its light.
Yael tells me tales of how pests infest her garden, of the arduous nature of weed-pulling, the disappointment of watching promised stems wither beneath the plane of another’s cascading shadow. She also tells me of the solace she now finds as a caretaker relieving her own intervention, letting her garden spill past the borders she had originally set in place. In her practice I recognize a phototropic process, a garden-body purposefully extending itself as it grows towards the sun.
This summer, I visit Yael’s garden. I find her at its precipice, no longer laying in the grass picking tomatoes, once the only thing she knew how to grow, but hovering over the thick bush of her garden, motioning towards the zucchini flowers still in bloom.
Written by: Ally Rosilio
