You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life.

Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.

You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”

This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.

A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.

Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.

Seeds and flowers come to punctuate the story of her life — chapters ending, chapters beginning, the maelstroms of uncertainty, the discomposure of loss, the discomposure of love. They appear at auspicious moments, illustrating the vital difference between signs and omens:

Walking by a few days later, she halts mid-stride upon seeing the peonies blooming once more — only to realize that another mourner had placed a posy of plastic flowers where the real ones had thrived. In the artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deepest reality we share — time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.

Half a lifetime later, living in a brownstone of her own, Debbie nurses herself back from heartbreak by making a small hopeful flower garden with a birdbath and tending to it daily with blind devotion.

She falls in love again, marries her soul mate, moves to California for a season and begins growing vegetables.

She navigates the terror and uncertainty of the pandemic by watching the smallest things grow.

And when the world finally regains its precarious balance, she travels its jungles and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly moss of Ireland, to bow before Japan’s sacred lotus, to savor Morocco’s Sanguine oranges and Tuscany’s Pesca Regina di Londa peaches, to run her hands over the elephantine trunks of Cambodia’s banyan trees and her fingers along the fibonacci spines of Mexico’s agave.

Over and over, she returns to her own garden for consolation and calibration. She learns patience. She learns perspective. Watching things come alive after a long germination, she begins to befriend time — the time it takes for a heart to heal, for a world to heal, for an ending to end so that a beginning may begin. Watching things die despite her best efforts, she confronts her lifelong fear of doing anything she isn’t good at — that is, she faces the abyss between the ego and the universe, the will and the world, the abyss in which we live.

What emerges from her Love Letter to a Garden (public library) is a tender reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time.