Is it a garden or a yard?

Years ago, I was “catching up” with a friend who lives in a different country. I asked him what he was spending his time doing lately, and his response surprised me.

“I’ve been trying to spend a little more time just enjoying my garden,” he said.

“I didn’t know you are a gardener!” I responded.

To that, he gave me a puzzled look.

I responded to his puzzled look with one of my own.

The confusion came over his use of the word “garden” which, in my understanding, was actually a “yard.”

I would come to learn that what Americans routinely refer as a “yard” — their “front yard” or “back yard” — is usually called a “garden” by people in many other countries. The confusing aspect of that is, for most Americans a yard is not the same thing as a garden.

When I think of a yard, I’m reminded of the one time I owned a home. I bought the house brand new, meaning it had to be built. Over the months, I was able to watch from prepping the ground, to pouring the foundation, to the structure being built. One of the last things new home developers do is a little landscaping. In this case, it meant a landscape crew showed up and unrolled “sod rolls’ — grass already growing in sod. So they literally rolled out a front yard of grass! In addition, they planted a new tree, stuck in a couple bushes by the house and that was it. Nothing was done to the back yard – if either a yard or garden would grow there, the homeowner would have to provide that.

So a yard is usually that patch of grass in front of and behind a home, possibly also including trees and other shrubbery.

A garden, on the other hand, is a part of a yard specially designated for growing vegetables, fruit, flowers, etc.

That’s, generally speaking, what Americans think of for “yard” and “garden.”

Not so for many people around the world.

For them, their yard is their garden. It may well be that strip of grass in front of and/or behind a home, but it also is all that other stuff — it’s also flowers and trees and shrubs and things that beautify the property or yield food. People in other countries tend to their property more, making their yards both a yard and a garden; their mentality is that the property outside their dwelling is a garden, not just a strip of grass.

Americans so often have “yards only” because we think we’re too busy for a garden. A yard requires the minimum amount of maintenance, or are simple enough that its cheap to hire someone to keep the grass cut.

But a garden requires cultivating and planting and tending and nurturing and growing and intentional fostering — all things many of us aren’t so good at.

Not just in gardening and yard care, but in life as well.

Many of us live bland, minimal lives like yards, something to put in the spot instead of dirt and requires little maintenance. To have something more beautiful, like a garden, means we must put in the effort to cultivate, plant, tend, and nurture growth.

Did you know most relationships fail because we fail to properly nurture them?

So let me ask you, when it comes to your life, is it a yard or a garden?

Scotty