B.J. Buckley

I grew up mostly outside in all seasons, the child of that generation of parents who believed that my sister and I needed open air as much as food and sleep, who dressed us for the weather and instructed us to go find something to do. And I grew up in gardens of one sort or another – the cemetery across the street with its lawns and towering conifers, a park with its ponds a few blocks away, my mother’s carefully cultivated beds of annuals and perennials. Her quests for cultivars that would survive subzero Wyoming winters at 6,000 feet led her to send us, on Sunday afternoon drives, knocking at the doors of strangers to ask for seeds or corms or “a division” of plants she had noticed in their yards for at least two years running. I planted seeds before I could hold them securely in my toddler fist, tucked baby iris into the earth as carefully as I tucked in my dolls. I carried Little Golden Guides to plants, flowers, bugs, rocks, and birds in every available pocket, obsessed with finding, describing, naming, questioning, praising; grubbing about in the dirt made me both naturalist and poet.

As an adult I have lived in a variety of rural – and inevitably compromised, altered, “managed” – ecosystems. The fire and logging-scarred second and third growth forests of southwestern Montana, with their glacier-scattered boulders, massive stumps, little springs, and remnant fragments of overgrown apple orchard, unlocked the gates to a different idea of garden. The northern Montana beer barley country where I now live – and the farmers reaching to ancient strains in search of varieties that will prosper in the face of weather that was always difficult coupled with rapid unpredictable climate change – led me to explore the multi-millennial history of the grain that has fed not only our bellies but our stories. I no longer hold the faith I grew up in, but I have kept to that tenet which declared all the world a garden from the beginning. And that we must care for it. I’m still on my knees with my nose to the ground, starts and seeds in my hands.