Seeing the Garden... and All of its Weeds

Our doorbell rang last week for the first time since early March.  Peering out through a window, we saw an anxious-looking, casually attired middle-aged woman with face mask in place.  Curious, we opened the door.

“I’ve been biking past your garden for months,” the woman said.  “I finally worked up the courage to ask if we could see it.”  She motioned behind her to a similar-aged man standing next to a car parked out on the street.

This is how our garden appeared
from the street in July 2020

Betty and I looked at one another.  “Sure,” I said.  A few minutes later, we were all standing, masked and socially distanced, on our sidewalk.

The woman explained she and her husband had grown tired of their grass lawn and wanted to make an ecological statement.  Our garden was the closest thing they had seen to what they envisioned.  Flattery, I guess, will get you everywhere.  For the next hour, we walked the couple through our property and explained how, over five years, we created our native garden from what had been a thicket of pines and nasty, invasive plants and shrubs. 

One of our stands of Monarda - in July

The woman was enchanted by what she saw; her husband, somewhat less so.  He kept asking about wildflower blends that could be purchased, sown, and cause their lawn to turn into a colorful meadow.  Betty carefully explained that ‘gardens in a can’ don’t take into account the reality of differing rates of growth or the aggressiveness of certain plants.  “You really have to start with lots of pots,” she said; almost but not quite apologetically.

The same Monarda in late August
after six weeks of drought and heat

While Betty pointed out and enumerated specific trees, shrubs and perennials – the names of which were entered into the woman’s phone; I was making a different list.  Mine was of tasks we had let slide during the debilitating, six-week-long heat wave that seemed a fitting accompaniment to our Covid-19 year.  Our guests thought the garden looked wonderful.  All I could see was the neglect.  Spent perennials had not been trimmed back and weeds were everywhere.  Paths were barely passable because of overgrown plants, and summer-blooming perennials were obscured by rangy shrubs.

I know Betty was seeing the same to-do list because, as soon as our guests left, she pointed out everything I had noticed, plus a few more problem areas.

One of our foundation plantings. To us
it looked terrible (oxalis highlighted).

Which, I guess, is the key difference between those who are visiting gardens and those who maintain them.  It’s a forest-and-trees thing: the visitor sees a pleasing green fuzzy ground cover with cute, tiny yellow flowers.  The gardener sees opportunistic and unwanted oxalis encroaching into every open space.  A dozen arching but clearly spent liatris can be viewed as a graceful, visual destination point; or they can be recognized as the husks of once-attractive perennials waiting to dump tens of thousands of seeds that will mean pulling out the same number of seedlings from every corner of the garden next spring.

The same area, after an hour's
work this morning

With the arrival of cooler temperatures, we’ve spent the first two-plus hours after dawn each morning bringing the garden back into some semblance of order.  As I fill buckets with the detritus of that cleaning, though, I’m also trying to keep in mind the genuine sense of appreciation those visitors had for what we’ve accomplished.  All too frequently, we dwell on the warts: all the things we’ve not done (and whether it’s a good trait or a personality flaw is a subject for another discussion).  

The spent liatris: a 'visual destin-
ation point' or a disaster
unless cut down immediately?

I strongly believe we need to leaven that ingrained dissatisfaction with a dollop of reality: real gardening is hard.  Whether it’s a small vegetable garden in the back yard or a manicured estate, creating something takes time and patience, and maintaining it requires a commitment measured in seasons rather than hours.

My back ached after pulling multiple buckets of weeds this morning, and the well-earned shower afterwards felt wonderful.  The best feeling of all, though, was looking past the newly cleaned areas to admire the half of the garden that still requires attention, and thinking to myself with a grin, ‘I had a hand in making all of that happen.’