Gardening is simple and easy. If you’ve thought of starting a garden, just ask a gardener how simple and easy it is. After all, it’s nothing more than digging a hole and placing a plant into it. Repeat. Water. Feed. Voilà. A garden. Sorry, that’s not what a gardener will tell you.

She’ll tell you about the best mix of composts and loams, and where to buy them, or how to create them (don’t get me started on composting). On the gardener’s list of activities too is the acute attention to details: the microclimates of her site versus the macro of the garden design. Also on the agenda: the pH, the nutrients and the micronutrients of her soil, how to test and amend the soil, sand versus clay, wet versus dry, hours of sun per day, and the areas that receive the brunt of winter’s winds.

OK, that’s a lot and it’s not uncomplicated. What else? Pests and pestilence: an infinite variety. Infinite problems, infinite solutions: organic remedies and preventions or all out chemical warfare—your choice. Employing plant partners to keep down pests, to till or not to till, whether to offer your garden’s slugs beer in which to drown them (no, it just encourages their drunken relatives to move in).

Give up? Have you decided to sit on a bench and read a book, take a nice walk, lie in a hammock—anything instead of gardening? No? Consider the weather and how much of it you’ll experience. You’ll plant and weed in the rain and the cold, as well as in the heat and searing sun, a bull’s-eye on your back for the swarms of biting insects. Perfumed in bug spray and sun block, you’ll be clothed from head to foot, leaving no entrance for ticks and little exit for the heat you’ll generate.

Don’t let me discourage you though: while working in a garden, you’ll enjoy the fresh air, if you are lucky enough to have fresh air, and the birdsong. Unplugged, you’ll be able to contemplate the world around you while you work, and enjoy the feeling of using your body to work.

Oh, yes: the body working. Most chores in the garden are best accomplished in positions that are designed to hurt your back, knees, hips and hands. Bent in two and kneeling, you’ll remember every weed you pulled for days. Stretch to undo the kinks, and you’ll know which side you favor when shoveling dirt. You will vow to change sides more often while shoveling (raking, spading, weeding)—but you won’t.

You won’t because the gardening takes over. Each activity takes over quickly, and you could do it all day—except that you can’t, nor should you try. It’s an elemental response, a basic need: to grow food, to tame, to beautify, to create. It’s simple.

Part of gardening is simple and easy. Part of it, a few minutes’ worth, really is digging a hole and placing a plant into that hole. But oh, how much pleasure you’ll have as your reward, to see that plant the next day, refreshed, roots stretched out, enjoying its new home and turning its face to the sun. Later, when you bend and kneel to pick lettuce for your supper, you won’t feel a thing.