Hand-Scooped a Gully, Gifting Me Gardenias | Grandma Kouzi

Gardenias in the mountain gully are blooming for the first time. My flowers have finally opened.

A month ago, on 16 June, was the anniversary of Èrén Valley. 2025 marks the fourth.

The small plot of land in front of the house yields more than enough, and the gully behind it — a place once deemed unfit for human habitation — now drifts with the scent of flowers. I must thank these scarred hands of mine: four years of scooping out this gully barehanded, delivering me gardenias.

◉ Thank these hands for delivering me a gardenia (in the left photo, note the difference in skin tone at the wrists).

I. Give Me a Gardenia

For a foodie, the only hard truth is whether something is edible.

In June 2021, I came here clutching a dream of self-sufficiency, ready to clear the land and farm. The central task of my first year was getting the soil into working order. My demands were modest: as long as something could grow, it didn’t matter what — just as long as it was edible.

The difficulty of clearing the land exceeded anything I had imagined. It took four months before I finally carved out a patch of soil fit for cultivation by autumn. Vegetables came first: the first wave of fast-growing leafy greens, followed by a second wave of overwintering crops. The following spring I would plant rice, grain crops, and fruit trees. Gardenias were never part of the plan — nothing about my mental image of this land included a gardenia. To northern folk, they were a precious curiosity.

In late spring 2022, I spotted white blossoms along my morning running route. I ran through the old methods of look, smell, feel, and ask — and confirmed it was the legendary gardenia, a single-petal variety. A wildflower by the roadside, unpicked, would have been a waste, so every day I stopped to pluck blooms and fuss over the weeds.

◉ Gardenia season: a flower thief’s daily routine.

Later still, I gingerly dug some back to try planting, terrified it wouldn’t take. But my local friends insisted this flower was “very cheap.” By cheap they meant tough, hardy, easy to keep alive. They proved right — much like osmanthus: an everyday roadside tree in the south that dies on a whim in the north. One land’s soil breeds its own flower.

Even later still, driven by the fearless, try-anything instinct of a born foodie, I tasted the flower — and confirmed that gardenias are not only edible but delicious.

The picked petals are air-dried until half dry, then drained of remaining moisture and preserved in sugar. That becomes a fresh flower jam, which in turn becomes gardenia fresh-flower cakes — surpassing the rose petal cakes commonly found in shops and perched at the very top of the Èrén Valley food chain.

Gardenia self-sufficiency takes at least three years, perhaps longer.

II. The Three-Year Rule of Self-Sufficiency

Although Fujian allows double cropping, in my experience so much is measured in “three-year” cycles: In the first year, recovering your seeds is a victory; the second year you keep paying tuition; only in the third year do things start running smoothly. Vegetable self-sufficiency came first, then staple grains — graduating from “eat whatever’s available” to “eat whatever you crave” — and each step took roughly three years.

Fujian’s damp, rainy climate rules out most oilseed crops that prefer dry conditions. I tried sunflowers (both oil and ornamental varieties) — failed; flax — also failed; sesame — I didn’t even dare try. Red-skin peanuts are the signature crop here, but they have a low oil yield, so I grow the Xiaobaisha (peanut cultivar) from my hometown. In 2021, the land preparation dragged on so long I missed the autumn peanut planting season. In 2022, I planted two crops — spring and autumn — barely enough to recoup the seed. In 2023, enough to eat and enough to save for seed, but still not enough to press for oil. There was an unexpected windfall, though: after pulling up the autumn peanuts, I sowed rapeseed as green manure, and this spring the golden sea of blooms yielded nearly 25 kg of rapeseed — self-sufficiency in oil is no longer a problem.

My bees have grown from two hives to six, and the honey is more than enough. That leaves only salt as something I must buy. My next small goal: gardenia self-sufficiency.

During the Èrén Valley gardenia season, petals appear everywhere — on the dining table, in the bedroom, on my workbench. Seemingly messy, but really a quiet, deliberate touch. Wherever I go, a subtle fragrance drifts, and the tiger in my heart is thoroughly satisfied. The mouth and the body need good food; the tiger within needs to smell the flowers and know them.

Give me a gardenia, and I won’t forget who I am. A busy life spent chasing food can make us forget the small soul that exists beyond our mouths and bodies. The gardenias in this valley are a gift I give myself.

◉ This is the gully now. The plants I put in, from left to right: a one-year-old ginger lily, duckweed, cattail, water hyacinth, ginger lily, and banana.

III. Capability and Limits

On 16 June 2022, my first Èrén Valley anniversary, I made a bet with my neighbour: For one year, no hired help — I would do everything myself, hands on. The stake was five kilograms of Ruiyan fragrant rice.

By then I was a fourth-year “old farmer”: two years of rice farming in Taiwan, one year of vegetables and rice in Gutian, and one year of clearing land in Èrén Valley. The paddy and vegetable plots combined in Taiwan came to about three mu — just under 2,000 square metres. Apart from mechanised tilling and harvesting, everything was done by hand, and I handled it with ease.

My practice of going it alone perished on 13 October 2022 — the rice had ripened and could not wait to be harvested, yet a fever dragged on for a week, refusing to break.

The most painful loss was not the five kilograms of Ruiyan, but having to admit the limits of my own ability.

That year seemed perpetually in the middle of an injury. Cutting my hand or bashing my head was minor. What was truly dangerous was tripping while pushing a heavy handcart and being flung sideways, or lifting something with all my might only to have a falling door panel slam into my chest. Fortunately, none of it ended in real harm. A cart I could normally manage, a weight I could normally bear — again and again they slipped beyond control in ways I never expected. It was proof that my ambition outran what my body could take.

Back in Taiwan, a novice farmer could manage alone thanks to the flat, fertile Lanyang Plain, its efficient and well-regulated irrigation and drainage system, and a comprehensive support network. Èrén Valley tested not just strength and skill, but judgment, choices, and adaptability in every dimension. I needed to learn not only the sixty-eight arts of clearing and farming, but also to acknowledge the boundaries of my ability — and my own powerlessness.

On the east side, Èrén Valley borders a country road; on the west, a mountain gully. During the land-clearing phase, the gully was used passively — bamboo roots and felled scrub piled mountain-high were simply dumped into it, saving a fortune in hauling costs. How much waste did the digging produce? As the image below shows, the field bund on the right is the original land boundary. Beyond it, a steep slope was gradually levelled out during land clearing, yielding a strip of farmland roughly three metres wide.

◉ The riverside landscape: the field bund on the higher ground to the right marks the land boundary, while the peanut plots in the centre were all built up from clearing waste.

Originally, both sides of the gully were thick with bamboo, and grass tall enough to swallow a person whole. Endless bamboo roots I could never fully dig out, weeds I could never pull up for good, injuries I could never stop collecting — and the money I poured in. The lucerne seed I sowed alone cost over two thousand yuan.

My original plan was to sow lucerne in the areas beyond the vegetable plots and paddy. As a deep-rooted perennial, once it became the dominant vegetation it would hold soil and moisture, suppress weeds — and, best of all, be delicious. It is the king of protein among grasses, and makes a spectacular steamed vegetable-and-flour dish.

The first batch of seed was thirty kilograms and cost over a thousand yuan. The germination rate was promising, but I had overlooked the weed seeds already in the soil. The lucerne could not match the weeds along the field edges and was choked to death, quite literally. I cleared every last weed and sowed more lucerne, weeding again and again, yet weeds remained the dominant plants here. Eventually I hired an excavator to scoop the silty mud from the gully floor and spread it as the topmost layer. Surely the silt would be free of weed seeds, and lucerne would finally take the lead — once again I was wrong. I had forgotten the wind, ghosting in and out untraceably, carrying more weed seeds with it. Pulling weeds didn’t just hurt my hands; it broke my heart.

◉ Above: the gully in its original state — bamboo on the left, grass on the right, both towering well over my head. Below: the gully as it is now.

IV. Compromising Between Ideal and Reality

When human hands can’t cope, you call in the guàishǒu. In Taiwan, an excavator is called guàishǒu — literally a “strange hand” — but a strange hand is still a hand.

From the old farmers in Taiwan, I learned to cut field bunds as steeply vertical as possible for easier weed control. Straightening the hillside would not only help with weeds but double as a way to tame this gully.

In theory it sounded perfect: dig out the old accumulated silt from the gully and pile it against the slope — the bank steeper, the channel narrower, the water deeper — more farmland, fewer weeds, and space to grow lotus and raise fish. A stroke of genius on multiple counts. In practice, the gully-reshaping project became a money pit. 2023 was Èrén Valley’s “Year of the Excavator”, and I went through six different operators.

There’s an old saying: “Wet mud won’t stick to a wall.” The watery mud in the gully was exactly that. The excavator would scoop up a bucketful of this thin soup and dump it on the slope, only for it to slide right back down to the gully edge. At best it clung as a thin film on the surface — one rain, and it washed away again.

Wet mud won’t stick to a wall, yet I refused to give up on this gully. Again and again I called in an excavator; again and again the mud slapped me back in the face. It wasn’t until the fifth operator that someone thought to rake dry soil from the cliff face down into the gully, forming a nearly vertical earthen wall about one metre wide and just over one metre high between the gentle slope and the channel. Then the gully’s wet mud was packed in behind it, and a brand-new growing area emerged.

Once the mud was tamed, I built two small dams just over a metre high and gained two stretches of plantable water surface, each over a hundred square metres. Fox nuts, water caltrops, water chestnuts — I bought every aquatic plant I could find. The biggest haul by far was lotus roots: starchy varieties and crisp ones alike. I wanted to turn this mosquito-ridden mud pit into a dream lotus pond — white lotus blooming across the north side, red lotus on the south.

Alas, after a whole year of planting and fussing, I never saw a single lotus bloom. Nothing else survived either — likely because the soil was raw and uncultivated, and also because the earth dams simply couldn’t hold water.

The 2023 construction season ended, by year’s end, with me finally accepting a concrete dam.

I had always resisted concrete, trying to minimise hardening and reduce humanity’s damage to the land. Both dams started as earth works. Of course I knew that not only would wet mud refuse to stick — yellow earth, too, could not withstand erosion — so I took precautions in advance. Timber stakes were driven vertically and horizontally into the dam base. The entire dam body was a kind of “mud concrete” — layers of earth and camouflage netting stacked on top of one another. On the dam’s surface, the spillway section was lined with double-thick plastic sheeting; the rest was sown with grass to anchor the loose topsoil above and hold the dam structure together below.

The idea was just like the lucerne: dreams were plump, reality bony. Fujian is rainy country. Every downpour swept away the top layer of vegetation and scoured the topsoil. After each rain I would add soil and reseed, only to be hit by another storm — until at last I bowed my head in surrender to the concrete dam.

V. Deliberately Planting Wildflowers

With a concrete dam in place, I no longer had to worry about floods and dam repairs. I went wild with planting. The lotus alone cost over a thousand yuan. Every kind sprouted, but not a single lotus leaf survived — my lotus-pond dream was destroyed by ducks. Neighbours upstream and downstream had all started keeping ducks. The neighbours, being novices, could never plug every gap in their duck sheds, and guerrilla ducks roamed freely everywhere. The moment a young lotus tip broke the water’s surface, it became duck lunch.

But that is not to say my 2024 was a blank. I lost the lotus and gained the ginger lily and the coreopsis.

The ginger lily and the coreopsis both grew wild by the roadside — free of charge. The ginger lily rhizomes came from a stream bed in the next village; the coreopsis was a chance encounter on my morning run.

Coreopsis is flame-like — a blazing gold that lights up the spirit; the ginger lily is pure white and fragrant, its scent impossible to ignore. I love them equally, without ranking one above the other.

I planted the coreopsis on the slightly higher bank, level with the road. The ginger lily loves water, so I set it along the waterline. Both are perennial herbs and dominant local plants — by the second year, a single plant grows into a whole clump. Already, patches of golden bloom carpet the gully edge. Next year those patches will merge into a continuous blanket, and in three years’ time, both banks will be walls of wildflowers.

Being woody shrubs, gardenias need longer to establish themselves than the ginger lily or the coreopsis. Single-petal or double-petal, large blooms or small — every detail of transplanting, taking cuttings, and the daily round of tending is ordinary, unglamorous work that stretches across years. I live within the life of the flowers, and the flowers live within mine.

VI. The Heart of a Flower Hides in Its Pistil

Before the fourth anniversary in 2025, I completed the final chapter of infrastructure work at Èrén Valley. In front of the house, I finally have a door — a deliberate boundary drawn between the outside world and my life. Behind the house, spanning the gully from east to west, I built a waterside pavilion. Neither the door nor the pavilion serves any production purpose. They are not essential farm infrastructure; they are a reward I gave myself.

Èrén Valley may be small, but the work never seems to end from dawn to dusk. Only the blazing heat of midday forces me to stop. Summers in Fujian are long and sweltering, and the waterside pavilion is my cool refuge from the worst of them. The hammock hangs a little higher, facing west — my gaze falls on a sea of golden coreopsis; the rocking chair sits lower, facing east — straight toward my hillside of gardenias. After a day’s labour, I slump into the hammock or the rocking chair, leaf through a casual book or don’t open one at all, mull over useless questions like “why do we live” or think about nothing whatsoever.

◉ The waterside pavilion in the gully is the coolest spot in Èrén Valley all summer long. In the photo below, you can see a small pile of gardenia blossoms on the table.

I love this line by Sartre: “No matter what hellish circumstances we find ourselves in, I believe we are all free to shatter them. If anyone chooses not to shatter them, it is because they are freely choosing to remain — that is, they are freely placing themselves in hell.“Each person has their own 命. It can be fate — invisible, intangible, unknowable. Or it can simply be life — the flesh of three meals a day. To settle this body in the world, then, is shaped in part by the unseen hand of fortune nudging things along in secret, and in part by my own two hands doing the work with my own doing.

I have spent four years building a life lived behind a closed door and under the open sky. The pavilion in the gully is a gift I gave myself — the cherry on top of the cake.

On the two slopes flanking the pavilion, double-petal gardenias grow thick. Those with large petals and broad leaves stand tall; the ones with small petals and narrow leaves creep along the ground, yet can still form a green carpet. For the first gardenias I planted: one year for cuttings to root and grow into seedlings, the second for transplanting, and the third — if they survived — was the year they first bloomed. Though there are only a handful for now, I am not in a hurry. After each flowering season I prune and take cuttings, slowly transplanting and expanding a little at a time, trusting that one day I will have grown, with my own hands, a whole hillside carpeted in blossoms.

Beauty graces the eye, fragrance drifts upon the breeze — I would not trade this for a king’s throne.

Foodthink contributor

Kouzi

Farmer and ultramarathon runner, village winemaker. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.

Unless otherwise noted, all images provided by the author.

Edited by: Tianle