Flashback: Littlefield Ornamentals Trial Garden
Littlefield Ornamentals Trial Garden
This post was originally published November 9, 2023.
Having gone to the University of Maine for college, I’ve been to the Littlefield Ornamentals Trial Garden numerous times. Sometimes it was to walk around, sometimes to quite literally smell the roses, and sometimes I just sat down in the grass and did nothing, letting my mind be yet another vacant space for the bees’ buzzing to echo through.
The garden features thousands of species of plants and trees and is used for research and teaching, though admittedly, I never experienced it for either of those purposes. When I was younger, I was no stranger to large, sprawling gardens. My mother had one, and without fail, every summer we’d drive down to Acadia to visit the Asticou and Thuya gardens. I always enjoyed it with little curiosity for the kinds of flowers I saw. I just liked looking at the colors, the shapes, and the butterflies that flitted from petal to petal. For me, some things were pretty beyond purpose, and I think I walked back up to the Litchfield garden to remember that, or at least to forget everything else.
One of the last times I visited, I had just finished a day of writing at the campus library, that now houses one of my stories. With time to kill before the next showing of the movie I was planning to see, I pulled out my McDonalds to go bag and sat in the grass to eat. It was summertime, and there weren’t many other people present. In fact, I only saw two, who busied themselves walking through the apple trees across the garden from me. I visited that garden a lot in college, but that wasn’t the first time I saw it.
When I was ten years old, I attended a writing workshop over the summer. We wrote stories and haikus and journals about ourselves and our relationship to writing. I still have the journal I used, which was laminated with a calendar image of a puppy frolicking in fall colors. One day, we walked to the garden to write. I scribbled in my notebook between the flowering bushes, and thought that the garden was so much bigger than it really was. That writing workshop was very distinct to me. Not because of the cool t-shirts we got from it that said “Just Write” on them (it was supposed to be a pun of “just right”), but because I read out loud a story I wrote in front of the group and when I looked up, I realized they were responding differently than the people who read before me.
They were responding differently because they thought it was really good. One girl asked for a copy of my story, and I gave it to her. I had family and teachers commend my work, but to have strangers say I was good at writing? That was the first time I truly believed it. I don’t write in the gardens much anymore, as I’m addicted to having the internet easily accessible, but walking through them is a nice reminder of what a tree filled with flowers can blossom in myself.