How plants guided my spiritual journey

Finding the blueprint for life in the garden

By the time I hit my mid 20’s, a seed was planted somewhere deep in my psyche. Despite growing up in the suburbs and never knowing a single person who grew food (beyond my ancestors) I became interested in homesteading.

I have never had a personal social media account, so my inspiration wasn’t inspired by Facebook or Instagram. I never watched YouTube until the past year, so the desire to have a small farm didn’t germinate there either. I didn’t know a single person who grew anything beyond flowers, shrubs and trees for landscaping so I know for sure I wasn’t inspired by friends, family or neighbors.

All I can assume is that my desire to grow food comes from within—it’s part of my blueprint.

My journey from suburban living in the desert to growing food on a small farm in Idaho took nearly a decade. My relationship with plants was slow, steady and consistent from the beginning; my favorite style of connection.

I know that many people dream of living on a farm someday, but for me the fantasy was more like a calling. It was like the farmhouse I live in today was a magnet slowly drawing me to a life I was always meant to live.

The only problem was that I had to give up everything I knew to follow my true path.

The seed stage

It all started with a quiet stirring. I started growing tomatoes on my patio in a studio apartment I lived in in downtown Phoenix. I don’t remember if that plant produced any fruit, and I don’t recall being very invested in the outcome.

Then, when I opened an art gallery/yoga studio in downtown Phoenix (2013), the space I was renting had a yard out back where I grew zucchini and aloe vera. I didn’t know how to grow anything at this point, but I was interested in trying.

It was a very eclectic area in the arts district and the landlord of the gallery let me look through her storage ‘junk yard’ to find anything I could use as pots.

I used all kinds of discarded items to grow flowers and to try my hand at growing food. I don’t remember being very successful; growing food in the summertime in Phoenix required a more experienced gardener. I killed pretty much everything I planted that year.

A few years later, living in Burlington, Vermont (2015-2018), I met a woman who was a skilled gardener. We worked together at a restaurant in our neighborhood and when I told her that I wanted to learn more about gardening, she suggested we grow a garden together in her back yard together.

I was living in an apartment at the time, and she lived a few block away from me. We grew a large garden together that year, and it was my first experience with gardening in a place that had four seasons. I fell in love with the process.

We ended up moving from that apartment to live in the Vermont countryside. We rented an old firehouse that had been renovated located on a few acres. Since we were renting, I wasn’t able to plant an in-ground garden so I grew as much as I could on the patio.

When I got a job as a flight attendant in the spring of 2018, I knew that my dreams of gardening would be limited for a while. I was initially based out of Boston and lived for several months with my sweetheart’s parents, who live on 80 acres in rural New Hampshire.

His mom is a seasoned gardener, and I helped her in the garden that summer in between all of my trips.

Fast forward a few years (though my days as a flight attendant) where I spent most of the quarantine in Arizona with family. I was back at it with trying to grow all kinds of plants but ended up leaving my seeds behind in Arizona to move to Idaho in the summer of 2020.

The first thing I did when I got to my rental in Boise was to head to the garden center to buy pots and plants. This harvest wasn’t particularly abundant since I moved in the middle of June, a little late to get started on a garden.

From 2015-2020 I moved seven times. Each place I landed, I somehow found a way to grow plants. Most of my harvests weren’t particularly fruitful, until we bought our home in 2021.

Growth that produces

Throughout all of my moves, plants are what kept me grounded. With all of the moving (schooling and training for my sweetheart’s career) I was never without plants. When we bought our home, the very first items that moved in were my indoor plants.

Even though we moved into our home at the end of April, I was quick to plant a mini sunflower field in our front yard next to a few rows of corn and a small vegetable garden in the backyard. It was the first season I actually got a small harvest.

The next season (2022) I had a little more time to prepare. We got a tractor and decided to turn our backyard into a garden. I went nuts that spring buying hundreds of plants at the garden center and having my first real opportunity to garden after seven years of gardening on patios, balconies, or in other peoples yards.

The harvest was exciting, as it was way more than I had even grown before. It was during this growing season that I started to notice that lessons the plants were teaching me.

Beyond the harvest

It became clear to me after the growing season of 2022 that plants were a grounding force in my life. My desire to garden was more than just a hobby needing to be explored. My pull to grow food was much more of a guiding force within me although it took seven years for me to finally put my hands in my own dirt.

Once I started to learn the ways of the garden, my intuition introduced me to what I was meant to learn all along. My garden taught me about looking to nature to return back to my true nature and how to trust my intuition again.

It was like I had been searching around in the darkness for years with a key in hand searching for the right lock. I’ve always known I wanted to write, and that I want to help women-the missing piece was the garden.

When I was surrounded plants last summer, it became clear that the garden was going to tie everything together for me. My garden taught me how to return to myself and how I was going to eventually use this knowledge to help others:

I learned about new beginnings.

I learned about growth conditions.

I learned about making a plan.

I learned about setting boundaries.

I learned about consistency.

I learned about pruning.

I learned what to do when I get overwhelmed.

I learned about celebrating the harvest.

I learned about letting go.

I learned about reflection.

I learned about rest.

I learned about preparing for a new season.

A season in the garden can show you how to naturally follow your intuition and have a fruitful season of growth.

The blueprint for life is found in the garden for those who are seeking a natural, intuitive way of embracing the many seasons in life.

I am certain that this season of gardening, writing and coaching was a calling that was planted within me many years ago.

The life I wanted, wanted me.

I have learned to embrace the call from within after so many years of ignoring and denying—and it is my hope I can inspire you to do the same.

-Ashley