Backyard Classroom
written by: Nancy Jageman
The normal life of plants is to germinate, sprout, grow, flower, produce seeds, repeat, and then die; life carried on through offspring and offspring. The new life of plants is to germinate, sprout, grow, flower, and die, but never reproduce. Last year, I bought a butternut squash from the grocery store. I dried the seeds, planted them carefully, and nurtured them as they grew. I watched them transform and mature, carefully and gently, from spring seedlings to flowing summer vines to fall flowers, lush and lemon colored, the size of my palm. Anxiously, I waited for the flowers to turn into fruits. None ever did. I waited and waited and waited, watching flower after flower die. Frantically, I tried to hand-pollinate them with a paintbrush, an emergency tactic. I waited some more. They all died. After speaking to a friend who knows more about gardening than I do, I learned that most plants these days from the grocery store won’t create new plants. This is because they’ve been genetically modified. The butternut squash I grew had produced only male flowers, completely unnatural, a fact I chose to ignore in my hopeful excitement for a successful harvest.
Some modern industrial farmers have polluted and distorted their friendship with the earth, exploiting it for profit instead of accepting natural methods which are mutually beneficial in the long run. This is why my butternut squash never grew. Real, natural farming methods are a result of friendship, a respect someone has for the earth, and the earth’s generosity in return. But harmful friendships of any type are created when one prevents another from flourishing in the way they were designed to be. The earth and its creatures have character, not in the way that humans do, but in a lovely way of their own. Nature and mankind were meant to live in harmony, but now, the friendship is spoiled by discord.
About four years ago, during a huge snowstorm, my neighbor Amelia and I, taking a break from ice skating on the driveway, sat in my room playing Monopoly. We saw what looked like the backside of a cat. I always wanted a pet, to my parents’ annoyance, so I left out an open can of tuna. Bad idea. A day later, I looked out my window and saw what I thought was the cat, but it was a raccoon. That was not what I wanted as a pet. A couple of months later, our garage ceiling fell in. A dead raccoon and its litter had been living above the sheetrock. I guess if you welcome someone in, they really will expect you to include them. If you welcome nature in, it ought to be treated well.
That is exactly how Amelia and I see it. To our neighbors, we are unfortunately that raccoon. While we can’t and won’t trespass close to others’ houses, we will take snowday shortcuts to her grandmother’s house through the deep forest in people’s backyards and pretend like the rusted-out, broken barbed wire fences simply aren’t there. The sight of two rowdy seventeen-year-olds traipsing through someone else’s backyard on a snow day is much more concerning than that of two young girls at play, but we forget we are no longer eight years old. But if we don’t do these arctic explorations, it’s bad luck, and the snow will melt. We won’t stop tradition and probably, the one this year was our last one.
Though we have made some questionable decisions, we have learned much more than if we had sat indoors and played piano, blindly following the rules. You can’t learn to exercise self-control unless you see why it’s necessary, and sometimes, you only learn that the hard way. The wildflowers are an example. They only germinate after overwintering in the cold, frosty soil, and are trying to teach you that suffering and failure are the best tools for growth. Their classroom is the backyard garden. I only learned their lesson through failure, by planting wildflowers in early spring and wondering why they never grew.
I started my backyard garden on a whim, but I learn from it continuously. When I failed to grow the butternut squash, I learned from it and became a better gardener. The natural method of learning through mistakes was the best way for me. Even when I didn’t fail, my childhood backyard explorations shaped who I am today.
My parents used to monitor me closely when I was young, worrying that I would climb too high on my petrified wood and sandstone house or in a tree. They were always saying, “Don’t climb there, that branch isn’t strong enough,” or “ it’s not worth it to climb a tree, you may fall down.” I didn’t care. I never fell. I loved feeling the wind rustle through the branches. If I climbed high enough, I would sway with the branches too, and I could see the city and the whole sky. It was the closest I could get to being an astronaut or a mountaineer. My parents thought they could succeed by stopping me, telling me to climb down when they got scared, but it never worked. They didn’t prohibit tree climbing, and so when they weren’t around to prevent me from climbing too high, I would climb as high as I liked. Eventually, they just gave up. As I climbed through the trees and through the years, my favorite trees seemed to take on character and personality. Or more likely, they became so accustomed to my presence that they could show it.
The gnarled old Magnolia, with its dark, pockmarked, dusty wood, was sickened by disease but wizened by old age. It was noble, majestic, and its twisted trunk reached higher than any other tree in the yard. It never let my neighbors and me, determined though we were, climb past the first branch, barely low enough for us to jump up and catch it. We hung on that branch like it was a monkey bar, but we never got any further. Over the years, it started snapping, splintering, dragging, and finally falling because of our efforts. It was a kindly old tree, but it held itself reserved, aloof, separated from us by age. It was never a friend, but always an elder, deserving our respect. Time estranged us, as it separates many kindred spirits.
The Crepe Myrtle, tall, elegant, and graceful, was but a few feet away. As children, we would run from failed climbing attempts in the old Magnolia to refuge in the Crepe Myrtle. It consoled us, letting us climb high up in its branches. It grew beautiful, lavender flowers, and kept its smooth, almost slippery branches strong and well spaced for climbing, so much so that I can still climb as high as the roof of my two-story house, probably higher, but it seems unwise to risk it. It nurtured many childhood days– warm summer mornings, chilly winter breaks, and fall afternoons after school. The Crepe Myrtle raised me, but even with all its selfless giving, I would often look over at the Magnolia and mourn for the climbing tree it could have been.
The other trees in the yard were never so well-loved. We had a pair of twin trees that we considered cursed. The first had two trunks at one point in time, but one of them had been chopped off and hollowed out, so because of my neighbor Simon’s third-grade humor and bad influence, it was named the toilet tree. We would mix potions of dead bugs and leaves and dirt and moldy rainwater that had collected in the basin. It was a funny tree, but its twin was terrifying. It had a huge, dark gaping hole in the side, filled with ants, spiders, and suspicious orange mushrooms, just low enough that we could see in the abyss. The yard around it became taboo, because the broken tree was the perfect size for a small child.
Each one of those trees had a unique and individual beauty (or ugliness) meant to be loved, not exploited. Careworn imperfections, diseases that benefit the ecosystem as a whole– these traits of the trees in my childhood playground made my childhood daydreams real. With my neighbors, I played Fairyland, Middle Earth, Narnia, World War (we even invented our own countries). The personality of the trees played an important role in the invention and action of these games. The Crepe Myrtle was the Shire, the Magnolia was Rivendell, and the twin trees were Moria and the Eye of Sauron. When we played World War, our bunker was our hideout, but the trees became strongholds crucial to any effective strategy.
My backyard, a huge, almost one-acre plot in the middle of Fort Worth, has so wonderfully avoided the trend of clearing out every native plant and replacing it with sickly pesticide-fed grass. My backyard is only so big because of the huge, rocky hill we live on, which makes building the houses virtually impossible. Because of this, most of the backyards on our street have become a safe haven for native plants and wildlife, but as new people move in, more and more of these wilderness backyards are getting destroyed. My backyard has taught me to appreciate unique and individual beauty, scarred and strengthened by imperfection, because this is the true beauty we see in nature. The destruction of nature in my neighborhood is certainly a tragedy in and of itself, but it is a reflection of a much greater problem. It is just one small side effect of a disease that poisons friendships and relationships. As humans, we are too quick to see our friendships as tools we can use to maximize personal profit, instead of respecting them as relationships in which we selflessly give and receive. No matter how many times we are taught, we forget that suffering is our best teacher, so we fail to love others for their flaws. It is only when we understand that the true beauty in this world is not of that type which is pristine and perfect, but of that type which is the result of transformation, redemption, and renewal through suffering.
- Backyard Classroom - March 11, 2026
