Hope you can see

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

A little over a month ago, millions of working people were furloughed from their jobs due to covid-19. As a brand marketing creative director for what was once a booming industry, I'm one of them.

I don’t know how long my furlough will last. I don’t know when I will see my friends and colleagues in person. I don’t know if live events will ever be quite the same again. I don’t know the latest about the pandemic or what's happening to our economy (even the experts don't know that).

What I do know is that there are things I can affect. One of them is my garden.

For me, building a garden is the epitome of hope. It’s vision and optimism I can practice in my own yard. As Audrey Hepburn said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

Whether I’m designing or building, gardening enables me to apply some of the principles that made me good at my job. Gardening is about creating experience through sustainable design. It’s a performance art that elegantly brings form and function together. A well-designed garden can last for decades and sometimes even centuries. (There are obvious parallels here to what it takes to build and maintain a brand.)

In my garden, I focus on constant soil improvement, studying light exposure, irrigation, drainage, microclimates and organic pest control. I explore and implement the patterns of plantings, textures, structures and color relationships. I obsess about fragrant varieties of plants and the tactile experience of one cultivar versus another. I do all this in order to create an ecosystem that will engage and inspire my family, friends and neighbors. Seeing birds, butterflies, bees, lizards, toads, ladybugs and rabbits in my garden makes me confident that the one place I can affect in the world works well for those I love.

Clearly, I’m on trend. Over the past year, and especially since the pandemic started, there’s been a 250% rise in the purchase of soil and compost. In fact, 40% of baby boomers report gardening as their leisure pursuit. Seed exchanges and social distancing garden parties are popular. This isn't just happening among the 50+ crowd, millennials are getting involved more than ever before. As a marketer, I know this trend is called cocooning. It's human behavior that often happens during times of personal focus, economic downturns, war and famine. When people are unsure of their future, they create protection and entertainment for themselves in the safety of their own space. Right now, with fear and uncertainty driven by the pandemic and an upcoming recession, many of us are going into a super-cocoon phase.

Which brings me back to the point of hope. As a creative director, I believe in optimism and the perpetual need to strategize and design solutions for how to work and live better. I love gardening and marketing because in both disciplines, when you do it well, it’s obvious. Gardening, like great marketing, creates hope you can see. Given the uncertainties all around us, hope is what makes life worth living.