I had the time of my life this summer at the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College. The gardens there are superb, truly some of the nicest to grace a campus anywhere. With 12 full-time gardeners caring for the college grounds plus a sizable team working at the arboretum, this is a well-managed space with an impressive amount of horticultural talent. I feel so grateful for the opportunity to work in such a beautiful place. I’ve learned tons, and some of my favorite lessons have as much to do with people as with plants.

Lesson 1: Just Let It Fall

When we’re out and about in the gardens, and especially when we’re weeding, which is what gardeners in fact do most of the time, we carry around flexible plastic buckets called trugs. Trugs perfectly fit into one another, so it’s easy to haul a stack of them around, that is, until you need to pull one out of the pack. Initially, that seemingly simple task was just out of my league. Due no doubt to one of the great mysteries of physics, trugs will refuse to separate from one another, thereby making you feel irritated and stupid. You hold them by the handles, and you shake, shake, shake, and they cling to each other like rabid puppies. The other gardeners stand around you in a circle, eyebrows raised, patiently waiting for their trug. They know this is something the intern has to figure out, a kung-fu-like rite of passage. You shake, shake, shake, and still, all the plastic buckets are immovably glued to one another. Finally, your co-intern Wylie, a young man too wise for his years, discreetly points out that this is best done by, and I quote, “holding the handles gently and just letting the bottom trug fall off on its own, which it will, if you only stop shaking it like a maniac.” So here we are— gardening lesson 1: just let the darn thing fall.

Lesson 2: Soft Power

Reading the paper the other day I was puzzled by an article about the return of rough and tough leadership in the American workplace. The Alpha-male CEO, fueled by extremely high standards and Diet Coke, hard on himself as well as everyone else, yells, berates, and demands total devotion and sleepless nights from his minions. I suppose this might work in some contexts, for instance, getting previously mentioned Alpha-male to Mars on his mother ship, and let us hope he stays there. For those of us who like this down-here planet best (it is the only one we know of, so far, with people and plants, so why the heck would we want to go anywhere else?), I am convinced the opposite style of leadership works best. At Swarthmore, I was struck by the unassuming way in which the arboretum’s head horticulturist, Josh C., managed our little crew. Josh is essentially the anti-Musk: kind, courteous, patient, and humble. The thing is, he is so impossibly nice no one wants to disappoint him, and we’d go to the end of the earth to make him happy—weeding, mulching, pruning, sweeping, or scooping muck out of the fish pond. So here’s gardening lesson number 2: loyalty and hard work are best cultivated by a gentle hand.

Lesson 3: Late bloomers

One special event that took place during my time on campus was the blooming of a lovely specimen tree, the Emmenopterys henryi. Emmenopterys is a rare Chinese tree that keeps the best trained botanists guessing. It has lovely fragrant white blooms that burst like fireworks for over a month, but the thing is it might only bloom once every twenty or thirty years, and no one knows why. I was told there is one such tree in an arboretum in Belgium; whenever it blooms the whole town gets a day off to celebrate. Scott Arboretum’s Emmenopterys was planted a couple of decades ago by a Grounds’ Crew gardener named Gus. Now this summer, Gus announced his retirement after thirty years of loyal service to the college, and boom! —The Emmenopterys bloomed for the first time. So I think trees are keeping closer tabs on us than we think. They pay us back for good care. Also: it’s never too late to bloom. Are you looking at me, tree?

Lesson 4: And then you die

The Arboretum director, Claire S. has been at the gardens’ helm for over thirty years (There are many long-timers at Scott, a sure sign the place has a way of lodging itself into people’s hearts). She is knowledgeable, personable, spunky, and a great female role model. I got the feeling Claire doesn’t very much like people who whine or complain; she’d rather seek creative solutions and move forward. Sometimes gardeners do not want things to change. Old habits die hard, and gardening has a cyclical quality that can make it hard to try new ways. I heard through the grapevine that one of her sayings when the going gets rough is something like: “well that’s life: change, change, change, and then you die.” It might be apocryphal but I hope not. It’s been ringing in my ears lately, every time I’ve been tempted to open my mouth and complain about change.

Lesson 5: Good companionship makes all tasks pleasant (or even poetic)

Did I mention weeding? Weeds are everywhere, plotting world domination. They will eat your mother and father. True, weed is just another name for a plant you don’t want. Sometimes it’s even a plant you actually brought in at some point because it batted its luscious eyelashes at you, but the hotty turned out to have no boundaries, a narcissistic personality, sharp teeth, and the ability to clone itself ad-finitum —there must be a horror movie about this. In any case, gardeners are always either weeding or thinking about weeds (as Josh would put it in his mild-mannered way, “it would certainly be challenging for someone who hates weeding to take on a job as a gardener.”) What I’ve discovered this summer, though, is that even a hot afternoon spent up to your neck in a shadeless garden bed pulling Pinellia ternata can actually be fun, and I mean real fun, when it’s spent in the company of good people. There’s a camaraderie among the weeding crew. There’s jokes, puns, fake posh British accents (« do summon the gaaardnaaa »), crawling on all four to look for lost tools, and lots and lots of talks about food. Amidst all the banter, conversations will sometimes turn existential. You’re sweaty and tired and your heart is full. You feel grateful for being alive, for new friends, sky, trees and even weeds. Lesson number 5 is not a lesson as much as a poem. Or a big fat Thank You.