What ‘A Girl’s Garden’ Can Teach Us

“A Girl’s Garden,” a poem written by Robert Frost, tells the story of how a young girl’s garden came about.

What Happens in the Story

The story is written from the writer’s perspective as he informs us about his childhood neighbor and what she did once on the farm where she grew up. By now, you’ve probably got a ton of ideas dashing back and forth in your mind. What had she done in her youthful years that caused her to receive such high recognition from Frost that he deemed somehow significant enough to include in one of his poems? The answer is that she built her own garden.

In the poem, Frost admires the hard work, dedication, and perseverance that the young girl showed while preparing her garden. Upon completion however, she soon doubted that the potatoes, radishes, and beans, among all the other offspring of her garden, were ever even hers at all. After all her hard work, she realized they may very well have been produced from a previous one before.

What We Can Learn

What can we learn from this story of the gardening girl? We can learn that things aren’t always what they seem. It reminds me of when somebody takes credit for another person’s deeds. For example, when a student takes a test in school and gets a high-scoring grade, he only thinks of his own hard work and his outstanding improvements in that particular subject. Meanwhile, he unwittingly disregards the dedication and training of his personal tutor who has taught him everything he knows. He or she deserves just as much praise and gratitude as the student because the tutor is the one who influences the student’s thorough thinking and mind processing, enabling him to arrive at the correct answers.

Also, before we put hard work into anything we do, we should make sure it’s what we really want and that it’s our right to use it. We should be diligent, informed, and respectful of other people’s belongings and property. If we aren’t, we’re going to end up spending all our time claiming something that we’re not entitled to and trying to perfect something that we find out later is completely and totally useless.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure why Frost decided to write about a girl and her garden but as I read further, I realized that “A Girl’s Garden” has some very important life lessons it has to offer. I recommend this poem for anyone wanting a little insight about the world around them.