Making Room For One More Plant

The Narrow Path

Every morning, I walk the same path through my garden.

The path gets a little narrower every year. Partly because plants grow, but mostly because I keep finding room for new ones.

Visitors sometimes call my backyard a jungle, and honestly, they’re not wrong.

The biggest culprit is my Celeste fig tree. It’s planted in an old whiskey barrel, though you’d never know it by looking at it now. The tree has become enormous. In just a few years, it has stretched far beyond the container that was supposed to contain it. I’m certain the roots punched through the bottom long ago like a convict tunneling out of prison.

The branches reach over everything nearby. Some mornings I have to duck beneath them just to make it through the garden. A heavy pruning would bring it back under control, but I never seem to do it. Partly because the tree produces more figs than I can eat, and partly because I like what it represents.

There’s something about a fig tree that refuses to stay small.

Gardeners often talk about the importance of pruning. Remove what is unnecessary so the plant can focus its energy. It’s good advice for plants. I have pruned this tree before, but not nearly as much as I should.

Instead, I let the fig spread.

The birds appreciate that decision. So do I.

Every summer, the tree produces enough fruit for both of us, and despite its bad manners, it has earned its place.

The truth is that nearly every corner of my yard tells a similar story. Fruit trees in containers. Peppers are packed into raised beds. Plants squeezed into spaces that probably weren’t designed to hold them.

I’ve even started filling the side yard now.

Most gardeners would probably look at those areas and see too much shade. They’re not entirely wrong. The sunlight only reaches certain spots for a few hours each day.

But gardening has always felt like an experiment to me. I’d rather try and fail than spend my life wondering if something might have worked. It turned out that this area gets just barely enough full sun for most of the potted fruit trees I grow. I’ll keep pushing those limits.

That’s one advantage of growing in containers. If a plant isn’t happy, I can move it. A tree that struggles in June might thrive six feet away in July.

Gardening rewards observation far more than perfection.

So every morning I make my rounds.

I know where every pot belongs, but I still watch my footing. One careless step can snap a branch, crush a seedling, or send me tumbling into a raised bed.

As the birds begin their morning chorus, I’m already searching for signs of growth and new fruit to eat straight from the garden. Blackberries are my favorite to eat fresh. They just taste so much better when you grow them than if you buy them from the grocery store.

The variety I recommend most is Prime Ark Freedom. Last month in May, I was picking a handful of blackberries almost every day. I’m actually surprised that the birds didn’t take more.

Gardeners learn quickly that life often happens where nobody is looking.

Looking for Peace

Photographers call this time of day the golden hour.

For me, it’s something else entirely.

I’m not outside trying to capture the perfect picture.

I’m outside looking for peace.

Before the lawn mowers start. Before traffic fills the streets. Before the noise of the world finds its way into my backyard.

Just me, the plants, and the birds.

For a long time, I thought I was searching for happiness.

Recently, I’ve realized that’s not quite true.

Gardening does make me happy sometimes. There’s a certain joy in harvesting a ripe fig or watching a seed become a plant. But happiness isn’t what keeps drawing me back outside every morning.

What I’m really looking for is purpose and peace.

Planting for Nick

Over the years, I’ve started a tradition. Every year on my brother Nick’s birthday, I plant something new.

Usually it’s a perennial. A plant that comes back year after year.

Gardeners love perennials because they continue producing long after the initial work is done. Plant them once and, with proper care, they’ll reward you for years. Planting a fruit tree that has the potential to out live me gives me the feeling that I’m a part of something bigger than myself.

But that’s not why I plant them.

The fruit they produce has become something more than fruit.

Each harvest feels like a reminder that the brotherhood I once had didn’t disappear after my two brothers passed away.

Every fig, every blueberry, every dragon fruit carries a small piece of memory with it. It’s a reminder that life keeps moving, even when we are gone.

Maybe that’s why I can always find room for one more plant.

The garden isn’t getting bigger.

But somehow it always expands.

Maybe grief works the same way.

Grieving is a strange thing.

Gardening taught me that growth and grief can exist in the same space.

What gives you purpose when life becomes difficult?

I’m curious if you’ve ever experienced something similar.

Has gardening, creating, building, or caring for something helped you find purpose after a loss?

Let me know in the comments.

What Grief Takes

People often describe grief as sadness, but I’ve found it’s much more complicated than that. It’s sticky. Confusing. It follows you into places where you don’t expect it.

Some months you’ll be fine and out of nowhere someone mentions them, or you see something that reminds you of them, and before you know it, you feel the weight of grief.

When you lose someone who was deeply connected to your identity, you don’t just lose that person.

You lose a version of yourself.

There are parts of me that disappeared the day my brothers died. Parts that only existed because they existed. The older I get, the more I realize that grief isn’t always about what happened in the past.

Sometimes it’s about the future that never got the chance to happen. It’s all the what-ifs that I lost that made it so much worse.

The conversations you thought you’d have.

The memories you thought you’d make.

The people you expected to grow old beside.

All the future plans were destroyed because they lost their battles with their demons.

Gardening For Mental Health Day 2026

This year, on Nick’s birthday, I planted three blueberry bushes.

If I’m being practical, blueberries wouldn’t have been my first recommendation for Houston gardeners. They can be grown here, but they aren’t exactly beginner-friendly.

They need acidic soil, careful watering, and more attention than many of the fruit plants I grow. Houston’s heat and humidity aren’t always kind to them either.

In other words, there were easier choices.

As I was mixing acidic soil into containers, I found myself wondering why I had picked blueberries at all. I would admit that I tried blueberries years ago when I was a beginner and ended up killing them. I just never tried again.

But not just because I thought they might die again, but since I grow in a small space, I decided to dedicate that space to more productive plants that grew better in my climate.

I could have planted another fig tree, which I love. I actually have eight different varieties in my small backyard.

Maybe another citrus tree? I have another dozen of them in pots.

Maybe another pepper plant, but those are annuals for the most part, so that really wouldn’t fit for what I was trying to achieve.

There were plenty of options that would have been cheaper, easier, and more likely to reward me with tons of fruit.

As I mentioned earlier, blackberries produce very well here, so more blackberry varieties would have been so much easier. But the easy path isn’t always the best direction. Sometimes we need to take risks and see what the future holds for us.

But maybe that was the point.

Grief isn’t easy.

Neither is rebuilding a sense of purpose after losing people who were always supposed to be part of your future. I still feel this loss of direction in life even years after they died.

That was the hardest part for me.

Not just losing my brothers, but losing the future I imagined with them in it.

The birthdays that would never happen. I hate how I get older each year, and they are forever 23 and 28. It just feels unfair.

The phone calls that would never come.

The fear that one day I might forget something as simple as the sound of their voices.

Acts of Faith

As I filled those containers, every handful of soil felt like a small act of faith.

Gardeners perform acts of faith all the time.

We plant seeds we can’t see.

We water trees that look dead, that are just asleep for the winter. Many fruit trees need to go through a period of dormancy during winter, during which they must receive a certain number of chill hours to produce fruit.

These are called chill hours, and each variety can vary, so it’s important to pick the right ones for your zone. In other words, don’t pick an apple tree like a Honeycrisp if you live in a zone like mine (9b), because those trees need between 800-1,000 chill hours during the winter months. Houston only gets an average of 400 chill hours, so the tree might survive, but it will never produce fruit.

We spend months caring for plants with no guarantee they’ll survive.

And somehow we keep planting.

Maybe that’s why gardening has always made sense to me.

Every handful of soil was a reminder that something good could still grow here.

Not because life suddenly became easy. Trust me it’s not, but nothing worth having is easy anyway.

Not because grief disappeared.

But because growth and grief have always shared the same ground.

The blueberries may struggle.

Some years they may produce heavily. Some years they may barely produce at all.

But that’s not really why I planted them.

I planted them because hope, like gardening, requires participation.

You have to put something in the ground before anything can grow.

And maybe, over time, something good will come from those plants.

Maybe not.

But at least I’m trying to build something that is my own.