Roots & Leaves: What the Garden Taught Me About Being a Father

A Father's Day reflection on soil, seeds, and the things we grow together

There is a particular kind of knowledge that doesn't come from books. It comes from kneeling in the dirt beside someone who loves you, from the weight of a rake handle worn smooth by decades of use, from the smell of earth turned over in the early morning. For me, that knowledge began with my grandfather.

The Education That Grew From the Ground Up

My grandfather had a way of teaching without ever calling it teaching. He would simply be doing something — pressing tomato seedlings into the ground, tucking chilli plants into their rows, mounding the soil around potato sets — and I would be beside him, watching, then copying, then finally understanding. We would dig up those potatoes together and eat them right there, still warm from the soil, and I understood for the first time that food didn't begin in a supermarket.

He taught me to read the garden like a language. How to identify a fruit tree not just by its fruit but by the shape of its leaves, the texture of its bark, the way it holds itself against the sky. I would climb the lemon tree and the apricot tree to help with the harvest, perched in the branches while he stood below, and from up there the whole yard looked like a map of everything he knew.

My Father's Hands

From my grandfather I learned to grow things. From my father I learned to tend them. He was the one who put a rake in my hands and showed me the satisfaction of clean lines in the lawn. He taught me to trim the bushes with intention, to mow in rows, to take pride in the work that most people consider mundane. There is a kind of meditation in the rhythm of it — the back and forth of the mower, the sweep of the rake, the quiet accomplishment at the end of the day.

My father planted a tree in my parents' front yard the year I was born. I grew up alongside that tree without ever quite realising what it meant. As it grew taller, so did I. I trimmed it, raked its leaves, kept it company without knowing I was doing any such thing. We were the same age, that tree and I, and there was something in that — a parallel life, rooted and reaching — that I only understood much later.

A Seed Planted in 2020

In 2020, the world was holding its breath. My wife Rivfka was pregnant with our eldest, Charlita. That same year, we launched our company in San Diego, and I came home with a small collection of agave seeds I had gathered there — drawn to them the way you are sometimes drawn to things you can't quite explain yet.

I planted those seeds with all the hope and uncertainty of that year. And they grew — thin green needles at first, barely distinguishable from grass, pushing up through the soil with that particular stubbornness that agaves seem to have in their DNA.

The seedlings, just weeks old — Agave americana, harvested in San Diego, 2020.

I believe them to be Agave americana — what I've come to think of informally as a variedad San Dieguensis, for want of a better name, because that's where the seeds came from. The broad blue-grey leaves, the stout terminal spine, the way they hold themselves: they carry San Diego in their bearing.

When Charlita was three, she helped me transfer the juvenile plants — by then sturdy little things with their characteristic stiff leaves — to the ground at my grandparents' house. I remember her small hands, her focused expression, the way she patted the soil down with a seriousness that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. It is one of the memories I hold most closely.

Charlita, three years old, patting the soil at my grandparents' house.

Those agaves are nearly six years old, just like Charlita. Same soil, same sun, same age. I hope she sees them again soon and recognizes herself in them.

What We Pass On

When I showed her the photo recently, she remembered — the yellow dress, the trowel, the dirt. She was three — the world was still mostly unicorns and mermaids and snacks. But she goes to a school now where she is learning to identify plants and trees, to understand the living systems that surround her. She has learned to love  hummingbirds, not just for being hummingbirds, but because she understands what they mean to the agave: that without them, the plant's story ends. The knowledge is finding her by other paths, but it's the same knowledge.

At home, she pulls weeds beside me, and often ends up building fairy gardens. Her younger brother is beginning to learn the same. I'm not sure they know they're being taught anything. I'm not sure I knew either, all those years ago in my grandfather's garden.

That's the thing about this kind of inheritance: it doesn't feel like lessons. It feels like time spent together, like dirt under your fingernails, like the smell of cut grass on a Saturday morning. It feels like love in its most patient and practical form.

This Father's Day, whatever you're planting — seeds, habits, values, memories — know that it matters. The garden is patient. So are children. And some things, once rooted, grow for a very long time.