As a child, I hated working in the garden. Gardening in those days meant pulling up weeds and chucking rocks from my parents’ ever-increasing vegetable patch in the back yard of our home, which was situated on a bench at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah. This bench had long ago been the shore of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, and in my imagination, the rocks I threw out of my parents’ garden were from an ancient beach, once inhabited by dinosaurs so large they must have considered the fist-sized rocks I threw out of the garden every spring to be no more than tiny grains of sand.

As I moved into adolescence and young adulthood, gardening did not get much better—but to be fair, I did not really give it a chance. I spent my early twenties in New York City, where the closest I got to gardening was finding myself weeping when a cab hit a tree in front of my building and broke the trunk in half. A few years later, MF, frequent Great Whatsit commenter and good friend, tried to help me grow flowers from seeds in a bright window of my Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment. But in spite of her green thumb, I did not have any success: after watering faithfully for several weeks, something tiny and sweet spouted up, but when I called MF to come take a look, I could tell the news was not good. She smiled kindly and said, “I’m sorry, Annie, but I think you’ve grown a weed.”

Subsequent attempts to grow things also failed. The geraniums I planted in pots and put on the front porch of my apartment during med school stopped flowering, turned pale-green, then brown, and died. And although I talked to them—as women’s magazines and Oprah Winfrey had encouraged me to do—the houseplants that were gifts from family members or men I dated lasted for two or three days before they collected bugs, shriveled, and then needed to be tossed. “I’m not sure I’m capable of taking care of another living thing,” I joked to friends. “At least my dog can whine or bark when she needs to be fed or go outside. How on earth do you communicate with a plant?”

Things improved a little when I moved to the Midwest—but only because the trick in that warm, humid climate is to keep things from not growing, rather than coaxing plants to stay alive. In my limited experience of childhood deserts and adult urban landscapes, nothing had prepared me for the lush, green, unending flora of eastern Nebraska: lawns—that did not require watering—had to be mowed twice a week; shrubbery could grow tall enough to completely cover the front of a house in just one season; and flowering plants flowered—and flowered and flowered—all summer long with little nudging and only a small amount of water. This was the land for a gardening novice like me. For the first time in my life, I killed fewer of the things I planted than those that lived.

Then I moved back to the desert. The house my husband and I rented when I finished residency had a large backyard that a previous owner had xeriscaped with indigenous and drought tolerant plants. There were three small vegetable plots built from railroad ties, and a deck that walked out of one of the back bedrooms into the yard. And on the day we moved in, the entire thing was covered in waist-high weeds. I had known about the xeriscaped garden when we agreed to rent the house, and had even looked forward to working in it, but looking out on that sea of weeds, I felt pretty overwhelmed.

It didn’t help that I did not have any idea what I was doing. “Tell me, again, what that plant is?” I asked the owner of the house, every time she came over for some other reason, and she would patiently walk me through the garden again, pointing out this or that, and explaining the blooming pattern and watering needs of each plant. “OK,” I would say, and act like I knew what was going on, but the truth was, aside from stories about dinosaurs and Lake Bonneville, and some isolated success growing a few things in Omaha, I had no context within which to understand the instructions I was being given.

So I just started chopping down weeds. It doesn’t take much skill to wield a hoe and pretty soon I realized I liked getting sweaty and enjoyed even more the silhouette of plants that remained after I removed wheelbarrows full of milkweed. But just as I was starting to appreciate the architecture of the garden, I discovered that in removing the big weeds, all I had done was expose smaller ones on the ground. Pulling them up, I got into some poison ivy and spent the next two weeks scratching holes in my legs and taking steroids.

Then the sprinkler system died. Although the garden was drought-hardy, it still required a small amount of water about once a week, and I had been relying on a soaker system that was designed to conserve water. But I did not really know how it worked, or what it was watering, and its loss proved to be the best thing that happened all summer: I had to start watering by hand.

One plant at a time I began making my way around the garden with the hose, slowly starting to recognize how each plant was different from the other, and how different configurations of plants made up each bed: tall plants in the center, medium ones throughout the mid-section, and small ones near the ground around the perimeter. I did not know any of their names, but their colors and fragrances and shapes began to speak to me, as did the way they changed and grew between each watering cycle. My husband helped me plant tomatoes and peppers in one of the vegetable plots and I began returning to the garden even when I did not have to water, pulling weeds, cutting back dead growth, and clipping flowers and long willowy stems to bring into the house. Plants hardy enough to withstand the desert were difficult for even me to kill.

I started reading about desert species on the Internet too, and even learned some of their names: Russian Sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), Lambs Ears (Stachys byzantina), and Blue Mist Spirea (Caryopteris x clandonesis). I also re-read a book from my childhood, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Secret Garden, whose heroine, a small and unlikely gardener, manages to bring a dark and neglected garden back to life. Reading this book, I remembered another, with a similar title, Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, and understood that both writers were talking across time about life and death and seasons and the power to change and grow things. I figured my backyard garden was teaching me a little about these things, too.

Pretty soon, and almost in spite of myself, I was passionately gardening. I would come home from work, exhausted, and head out into the garden before going to bed. I started bringing a five-gallon bucket I bought at Lowes into the shower with me and used the grey-water I collected while showering to water the annuals I placed in pots on the deck. Except for the tomatoes and peppers, all summer long I never added a single, additional plant to the garden proper, but I did not need to. I was in beginners paradise, simply bringing back to life the plants that someone else had put into the ground—the garden a previous owner had been kind enough to envision so that I could see it, now, too.

As summer is ending, I find myself getting ambitious for next year. Although I am not yet much of a gardener, I want to add a few plants of my own: a desert pine I plan on using for a Christmas tree this December and then placing in the ground; ivy from the front yard I want to transplant to the back where it can climb a cinder-block fence; and desert grasses I do not even know the names of yet that I want to plan and wish and shop for all winter long in seed catalogs.

In the little bungalow that is our home, my desk sits beside our bed, and I can turn to my left and look out the window at the garden. I gaze outside and plot and scheme. I remind myself to weed and water and imagine installing an elaborate system next summer to collect rainwater. I promise myself I will learn more about composting and organic gardening over the winter and put these things into practice when the garden comes back, next spring.

But even as I am scheming over the garden, imagining myself its caretaker and myself in charge, I realize that the garden has taken care of me. I was a little broken when I moved in—my head clogged-up with learning too much medicine in too little time. Weedy, desiccated, and tired, tangled-up, distracted and worn-thin, I put myself to work on a landscape that looked a lot like I felt inside. I watered and weeded, cleared out dead plants and watched things grow back, and all along, the garden watered and weeded me.

I am certainly not the first person to discover the soul-saving work of spending time outdoors and making things grow, but I might be the most recent—if reluctant—convert to a pastime people much wiser than I am have been pursuing for a long time. Somewhere, somehow, on hot days in July and August and June, the garden brought back to me simple things: that the color green is beautiful. That there are many, many colors of green. That morning dew feels wonderful on bare feet. That moving slowly and where the earth calls you is pure, luxurious pleasure. That some plants thrive even in the desert.