Walking The Lenten Garden
The Pine Nettle Mulch – Fourth Sunday Lent
This isn’t something most people stop to think about.
You walk across it every day — a soft layer underfoot, brown and ordinary, doing its job quietly. In my garden, it’s pine nettle. It’s what was used long before bags of mulch lined store shelves. It’s how gardens were cared for when people worked with what fell naturally and trusted the process.
I love that my garden is blanketed this way — not because it stands out,
but because it feels true.
Pine needles fall on their own. Nothing has to be forced. What drops from the tree doesn’t go to waste — it becomes covering. It settles in, protecting the soil beneath, holding in moisture, sheltering roots that are still finding their way. Everything growing depends on it, even though no one ever stops to admire it.
Standing there, looking down, I start thinking about how much of life works the same way.
So much of what helps things grow is quiet and unseen. The most important support often comes from what lies underneath — made up of what has fallen, what has been gathered, what has been laid down slowly over time.
There’s something grounding about that.
Not everything meaningful needs to be noticed. Some things are meant to stay close to the earth, doing their work without attention. And there’s comfort in knowing that nothing is wasted — that what seems ordinary still has a purpose.
Sometimes growth happens because of what’s beneath us, not in spite of it.
And sometimes, it’s enough just to notice where we’re standing.
Lent asks something similar of us.
It’s a season of letting things fall gently to the ground — old habits, old worries,
the need to hold everything so tightly. What we lay down doesn’t disappear.
Like the pine needles in the garden, it settles quietly and becomes part of the soil where new life will eventually take root.
Maybe that’s part of the wisdom of the season — trusting that even what falls away still has a purpose.