A Conversation with Ted M.
Interview by Ethan Cole — JP Journal
Most gardeners talk about fertilizer, irrigation, pests, and harvests. Ted M. writes about those things too, but often from a different angle. In his work, the garden is not simply a place where food is produced. It is a place where patience, observation, uncertainty, failure, repetition, and attention become visible.
Over the past months, his articles have attracted a growing audience among gardeners in Vancouver. Some readers have embraced his observations. Others have challenged his conclusions. A few have affectionately nicknamed him “Farmer Ted.” Whatever the reaction, his writing has managed to do something increasingly rare: it has started conversations.
Ted M. is not a public figure and rarely speaks about himself. He asked that his identity remain private and prefers that his work be judged before his name.
What drew our attention was not only the gardening. Many of the ideas running through his articles — patience, observation, the relationship between control and attention, and the experience of working with uncertainty — feel relevant far beyond the garden. They speak to artists, filmmakers, writers, and anyone engaged in a creative process.
For that reason, we invited Ted M. to take part in what appears to be his first published interview.
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Ethan Cole: You have written several times about “attention” rather than “control.” What was it in the garden that moved you away from trying to control things and toward simply paying attention? Was there a particular moment?
Ted M.:
Control is often a response to fear. When we try to control a garden completely, what we are really saying is that we do not trust what will happen if we stop.
I began to question control the first time I noticed the garden was already doing something I had not planned. The soil was warming without my permission. The light was arriving at an angle I had not arranged. Insects were finding plants I had not even noticed yet.
Something was happening before I arrived, and something would continue after I left.
That realization changed the way I garden.
I still intervene. I still prune, water, transplant, and make mistakes. But I no longer think my role is to dominate the process. Observation became more important than control.
The garden does not need a conductor. It already has its own rhythm.
The challenge is learning to pay attention long enough to hear it.
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Ethan Cole: Why is the smell of tomato leaves so personal and memorable to you?
Ted M. paused for a long moment.
He smiled.
Then said nothing.
Under the terms of this interview, Ted reserved the right to decline one question. This was the one.
We moved on.
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Ethan Cole: If you had to construct a simple story about how you became a gardener, what would it be? And why do you prefer to talk about traces instead?
Ted M.:
I could probably invent a simple story if I wanted to.
Maybe it would involve a childhood garden, a family member, a particular fruit, or a summer afternoon. Most of us have those stories available. They’re neat. They’re memorable. They fit comfortably into a conversation.
The problem is that I don’t think they’re entirely true.
I don’t believe anyone arrives at gardening because of a single moment. Those stories are usually constructed afterward. They’re what we tell each other between two cups of coffee because they’re easier to share than the real answer.
The real answer is often scattered across years.
A smell you remember but can’t place.
A season that stayed with you.
The weight of a fruit you weren’t expecting.
The feeling of kneeling in the soil for reasons you don’t fully understand.
Those things feel more honest to me than a clean explanation.
We’ve become very skilled at summarizing our lives. I’m more interested in the details that resist summary.
That’s why I prefer traces.
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Ethan Cole: Some readers have described your recent writing as overly personal. How do you respond to that criticism?
Ted M.:
Gardening in a city, in this century, is already a deeply personal act. Choosing to put your hands in the soil when you don’t have to is not a neutral decision.
Scientific information about gardening is valuable. I use it myself. But it’s also available almost everywhere now — in books, databases, apps, videos, and tools that can calculate things faster than I can.
What those tools cannot tell you is why I stood in the rain for twenty minutes looking at a tomato plant. Or why a particular harvest stayed in my memory long after I had forgotten the yield.
The personal is not a weakness in this kind of writing.
It’s the part that cannot be automated, summarized, or replicated.
If a reader learns something practical from an article, that’s good. If a reader remembers a garden differently after reading it, that’s even better.
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Ethan Cole: It seems that every year you end up surrendering something in the garden — to cats, slugs, insects, or simply nature. Is that a philosophy or just realism?
Ted M.:
Both. And I’m not sure there’s a difference.
You fight for survival — that’s honest. You protect seedlings. You pull weeds. You try to keep the slugs away from the lettuce.
But after enough seasons, observation teaches you something uncomfortable: you are not going to win every battle.
Not against slugs. Not against an aggressive weed. Not against a cat that has decided your lettuce bed belongs to him.
The garden is full of other lives with their own intentions. Most of them were there long before I arrived.
What I’ve learned — slowly and sometimes reluctantly — is that coexistence is not the same as giving up. It’s simply an acknowledgement of reality.
The garden does not belong to me. I participate in it.
The garden understood that long before I did.
—
Ethan Cole: Is your interest in wild bees and independent pollinators a reflection of how you think about human relationships?
Ted M.:
As a child, I read The Life of the Bee by Maeterlinck. I was fascinated by the order of it — the precision, the apparent perfection of the hive.
Years later, standing beside a friend’s hive, I saw something I hadn’t noticed as a child. The colony functioned beautifully, but it also depended on a great deal of structure and control.
I don’t know if that says anything about human relationships. I’m cautious about those kinds of conclusions.
What I do know is that the pollinators I trust most in my garden are the ones nobody owns. The solitary bees. The hoverflies. The visitors that arrive without being summoned and leave without asking permission.
There is something about that independence that I find deeply reassuring.
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Ethan Cole: How did Vancouver shape the gardener you became?
Ted M.:
Vancouver doesn’t accept control. It never has.
You can plan, prepare, calculate — and then it rains for three weeks in May and none of it matters.
There are usually several false springs before the real one arrives. The city warms just enough to tempt gardeners into believing the season has started, then turns cold again. It teaches patience whether you want to learn it or not.
Sometimes I think of Vancouver as a horse that was never fully broken. You can work with it. You can learn its habits. But it is not especially interested in your schedule.
And yet, when spring finally arrives — the real one — the entire city changes. The difficult weeks before it become part of the experience. You appreciate growth differently because you waited for it.
More than anything, Vancouver taught me that a place does not belong to you simply because you live there. The most honest relationship with a place, like the most honest relationship with a garden, begins when you stop trying to own it.
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Ethan Cole: Some of your readers call you “Farmer Ted.” What is the difference between a gardener and a farmer, in your view?
Ted M.:
I’m grateful for the name. Genuinely. If someone calls you a farmer, they’re usually saying something about how seriously they take what you do. I accept that.
But I’ve always thought of myself as a gardener.
A farmer feeds people. A farmer works within realities that are economic as well as biological. There is a responsibility there that I respect enormously.
A gardener has a little more freedom. A gardener can spend twenty minutes looking at a flower and call it a productive afternoon. A gardener can become interested in a smell, a bee, a leaf, or a question that may never have a practical answer.
That’s probably where I belong.
Titles don’t change what actually happens in the garden. A plant doesn’t care what you call yourself. It cares whether you’re paying attention.
What makes me happiest is watching a struggling plant recover. Or seeing a gardener who was intimidated by soil suddenly begin to understand it. That moment belongs neither to farming nor gardening. It belongs to attention.
Call me what you like. I’ll be in the garden either way.
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Ethan Cole: If someone wanted to start gardening purely out of curiosity, what advice would you give them?
Ted M.:
Sunscreen.
Seriously. Vancouver sun looks harmless. It isn’t.
After that, kneel down. Touch the soil. Plant one seed. Then watch.
Make mistakes. The garden will correct you more honestly than any book. A book tells you what should happen. The garden shows you what actually does.
Curiosity is enough to begin. You don’t need experience. You don’t need a five-year plan. You only need to be willing to pay attention to something that doesn’t speak your language.
Most people who fall in love with gardening don’t remember the first plant they grew successfully.
They remember the first one they lost — and went back anyway.
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Ethan Cole: Does the cat know that you’ve finally concluded he was the one who won?
Ted M.:
The cat knew from the beginning.
He always did.
The one who needed to arrive at a conclusion was me.
The interview ended much the same way it began.
Without certainty.
Without conclusions.
Only with a few observations, a few unanswered questions, and the sense that Ted M. is less interested in explaining a garden than in paying attention to one.
As we left, he returned to the beds.
The cat remained.
The garden, as always, continued.
— Ethan Cole JP Journal
JP Independent Journal 