what a garden is

"Garden" never means the same thing to any two people. I don't usually list "gardening" as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people "I'm a gardener." Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other "gardeners" and I will have radically different notions of what "gardening" entails. As I was weeding my weeds (digging the grass and oversized milkweed out of the lambs'-quarters and wild sorrel) this morning, I started thinking about all the versions of "what a garden is" that I have met in my life so far. garden as child labor When I was a kid, my parents had some friends. I was expected to be their kids' friends because our parents were friends. We never really were friends, though. Probably because every time my parents and I visited them, the adults never gave us a chance to play. They always put us kids to work in their garden. According to the kids, the garden belonged to their parents but was somehow their daily job. Their parents expected…