Charlene Langfur

For many years I have promoted a return to home gardening. My writing has been a way for me to encourage people to garden and grow their own food again especially now in a time of climate change. I began my own garden farm in Sedona on two acres of land in 1989 and spent ten years working on the land all day. The garden was in me after the first year. I took to the smell of the soil in the night, the lustrous red strawberries and the habit of the land stuck with me. Each day I looked after vegetables, fruit, herbs, the almond tree and the raspberry bushes, a world that worked, a world of edible flowers, small daisies, nasturtium, violets for soup, plants with heart-shaped leaves, a place of mint and ginger and pollinator bees. The garden took me over, endlessly, sensuously, all of a world.

When I finally planned to move the gardens to another location after ten years, I lost them along with my home when my life partner refused to move with me as promised. The Sedona gardens were a work of love for me as well as anything else, and I have continued to garden and write about gardens wherever I have lived since then. For the past 15 years I have lived in Palm Springs, California, one of the hottest places on earth in the summer. Last year some days the temperature reached 123 degrees. Gardening takes special care here.

I now live in an apartment near the old oasis where the fan palm trees grow and the desert is alive with wild flowers every Spring when the cactus blooms and the yucca flowers look like lilies. I have managed to grow a substantial small garden on my porch, an essential tool for getting through the pandemic of the last few years. Always the garden reminds me every day how we are connected to the earth and plants. This winter a large plastic pot yielded a half dozen sunflower in the middle of February and a clay pot of orange nasturtium was in constant bloom. The aloe plants became giants.

All these gardens in my life have buoyed me up, changed my life, helped me stay constantly connected to the earth around me. Always I have new plans about what to plant, and I am still learning about seeds and cactus and lizards and the dreaminess of petals blooming in the middle of the night as they do. My life as a serious gardener is reflected in my essays, stories and poems. My deep connection to the earth and my plants enriches my life and my writing.