My favorite painting in the Art Institute is that oversized study in grays and triangles by Gustave Caillebotte entitled “Paris Street, A Rainy Day.” Dated 1877, it shows exquisitely coifed men and women strolling a Paris street so convincingly shiny with rain that you can almost feel the dampness on the cobblestones. But painting wasn’t all that Caillebotte did. In fact, the man was a gardener. Big time. In the book Monet’s Garden, author Vivian Russell recounts how it was a common love of gardening that made Caillebotte and his more famous counterpart Claude Monet such chums. The two men “had the same taste in plants, swapped them regularly, and corresponded faithfully, all the while talking about gardens, and not a word about art,” she writes. (italics mine.) Imagine. Two great artists of the 19th century, and when they wrote letters to each other, all they wanted to talk about was plants and gardens. Know the feeling?

Other artistic types have been similarly besotted. For instance, there’s the early 18th century poet Alexander Pope, remembered from high school lit class (if at all) as the author of such lines as “Hope springs eternal in the human breast “ or “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Famous in his lifetime for his prodigious poetic output, Pope started thinking about ideal landscapes and garden beauty when he was only 16 years old and never stopped. His own garden was a lifelong interest, and he also designed for others.

Moving back even further, we find the English philosopher Francis Bacon writing in his 1625 essay “On Gardens” that gardening “is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.” He then asserts that it’s easier to build fine buildings than to create fine gardens— “as if gardening were the greater perfection.”

Gardening more difficult than architecture? The idea’s not as far fetched as we might think. Architecture melds design with engineering, and once a building’s up, it usually stays put. Sometimes for hundreds of years. Gardening, on the other hand, is a combination of design imposed on variables that we can’t control—weather, time, insects, diseases, and the inherent, genetic nature of the plant itself. Plants move around. Or they grow more slowly than we would like. They die. Creating a fine garden is like trying to hit a moving target. Every year.

And yet we persist. Because things happen when we’re out there that are beautiful, that stir the soul. They give us joy and peace and the will to live.

So now that the gardening year is fully upon us, get out there and dig. Do what pleases you. And if it falls short of what you intended, never mind. Nobody ever said it was easy.