“I thought I was going to help you plant those three things you bought last week.”
Shaking dirt from my hands, I look up to see my son frowning down at me where I’m futilely trying to pull a particularly insidious weed out from amid a bed of pachysandra. “I know, I got distracted. Can we do it later? I’m, um, not exactly sure where I’m going to put them.”
How many times have I said those words—“distracted” and “not sure where to put the new plants”—about me and gardening? It’s not just a rhetorical question; recently I came across two pieces I had written on this very subject. One is from about seven years ago, the other just last year, proving that these problems are not new, nor have I made any progress in addressing them.
This from the first: “It’s a beautiful spring morning and I can hardly wait to head out to the garden. My trowel isn’t in one of the several places I usually stick it, so I grab a pronged implement. I try to use it to dig a hole for a potted perennial I bought two weeks ago, but the dirt keeps falling through the prongs. I start searching for the trowel again and notice the dead blossoms on the tips of my blue lacecap hydrangea. I’ve got my clippers in my pocket but not my gloves. Despite my promise to myself, I use my bare hands to pull at the violets beneath the shrub. Soon my hands are grimy and dirt is embedded in my split nails. I’m not making a dent in the violets so I start to clip the hydrangea, wishing I could remember whether this one should be pruned in the spring or fall.
“I go over to check on my Annabelle hydrangeas, which I did know when to prune. On every new plant about half the leaves are stuck together, forming tiny pouches. I pry one open and find a tiny worm and some black stuff—eggs, I presume. Like a madwoman, I open another 30 or so pouches until my fingers are covered in worm and worm-egg slime. I see that the brief but heavy rain has bent over the stems of my amsonia and the peonies that I forgot to stake—again. I’m still holding the homeless plant. My puppy, Hattie, has found the trowel and is prancing around the yard with it. I know better than to think she’ll give it up to me. Feeling overwhelmed, I head into the house.”
Three laws
And just last year: “This spring, as I do every spring, I renewed my determination to go straight. I knew the laws I had to follow. First, do not go nursery shopping before you have done the cleanup chores and made room in the garden. Second, do not buy any plant until you have a clear plan for where to put it. (The ‘plan’ cannot be to suddenly create a new garden in order to accommodate the plant you had no plan for.) Third, do not hesitate to rip up plants that are not performing well or that are actually thugs. As recent Harvard Garden Club speaker Kerry Mendez said, ‘Make this your mantra: Plants are not children or pets.’ She also said to ‘right-size’ your garden. Get rid of under-performing plants, put in fewer varieties but several plants of the same kind that will give you longer bloom. It all made such good sense. I was totally on board.
“So how is it I am standing in my yard, new plant in hand, three more at the ready—each a different kind—wondering where I can put it? How, armed with resolve to reform, could I have stopped at a nursery in the first place, knowing what I did about the state of my garden. Who did I think I was kidding with the ‘just looking’ response to helpful salesclerks? (At least I know better than to ‘just go look’ at puppies and kittens.)
“I look at the plant that needs a home. What about the bare spot on the side of the house? Oh, yeah, hosta are coming up. I can’t possibly dig any of those up; I don’t really like them, but they have been here as long as I have. Replace the goldenrod that’s encroached on the flower border? No, I sort of like that, now I know it’s falsely accused of causing hay fever. Around the pond? No, I’m thinking I’ll make a new daylily bed there.”
OK, this is all too ridiculously familiar. I put the plant down next to the three other pots, each of which has previously had the grand tour of the yard. I’ll tackle this tomorrow.”
While some things haven’t changed (including now-middle-aged Hattie’s propensity for stealing an abandoned trowel), I think my attitude about me and gardening has. I have gone from discouraged to resigned to now philosophical—or at least trying to be. I remind myself to bear in mind these words from Elsa Bakalar’s “A Garden of One’s Own”: “The destination—your ‘dream garden’—is always around the next bend, always receding, and the getting there, even though never quite arriving, is much more than half the fun.” Whatever the reason for having a garden, “It’s the being in it, after all, that counts, that makes gardening the absorbing thing it is.”
