I waited 40 years and fought the knowledge tooth and nail but I have learned how to garden and how to enjoy gardening, my way. I have two tiers of what they call “English Garden” in my front yard. When we bought the house it has just a slope with dying daisy bushes. My Brother, bless his hardworking soul, turned the slope into two level tiers, which was the idea of my brilliant Mother…the gardening queen. We gave a garden store employee carte blanche to pick plants for us and then I got the joy of placing and planted away. Wheee, yuck.
And I was introduced to gardening. Because once you plant it all…then the real work begins. The constant maintenance.
At first I was a little stressed. The pressure of making sure this thrived because we had spent so much money on it. I knew how to weed…doesn’t everyone? But sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a wanted plant and an unwanted weed. I had to let the occasional green shoot grow until I could tell it was grass or dandelion or whatever it was. That’s how I learned. Turns out weeds pull out easier when they are long enough to grab and that no matter whether you get the root or not, they are always coming back.
Then I had to learn how to do what’s called “dead-heading”, cutting the dead flowers off the plants so they could flower more. How far down to I cut? Pretend I’m taking a cutting for a vase? Pretend I’m a goat grazing in my garden? Again I learned by doing, wrong or right. But what I really learned was “Who cared where I cut it, it was my damn garden!”
Then some plants grew and grew and grew and others didn’t make it no matter what I did. And I learned how to prune. By now I was familiar with my style of gardening and what I would like my garden to look like. So I hacked and hacked and hacked until I had much smaller mounds of the out of control growing plants. If I hacked too much and it died, I didn’t care; I planted a new plant in its place. Again…my damn garden!
How do I now enjoy gardening? I like to purge things and I purge the overgrowth and weeds and make my garden as neat as a wild English garden can be. I keep trying to plant more color but it’s a hit or miss on what survives, this being Southern California and my slope getting constant direct sunlight. Yet I’ve given up trying to get it perfect. I’ve learned to take it in stride when something I spent money on dies in the place I planted it. Maybe it was in the wrong place or just the wrong plant.
The full frontal
Life is like that. I can choose to obsess or fret or get upset over shit that’s happening how a plant is doing. Or whether I’m tending my garden well, correctly or like an idiot. Or I can shrug it off, let it go and admit deep down inside its not worth the stress I don’t really give a fart. They’re plants and I’m an indoors, let someone else cook for me, lounge on the couch kind of woman at heart. The garden is like the knick knacks on my bookshelf…happy to be ignored, dust me occasionally. Or trim & weed me in the case of the garden.
It’s been at least 4-5 years since we put this in and believe it or not all you see are mostly the original plants. Sometimes I’ll rip something out because it got too wild and too full of weeds and guess what…I must never get it all because it comes right back…nice and trim and neat. It’s not the way I would like it to be exactly…but it’s the way it wants to be and sometimes that’s just what you gotta accept.
Not only do I get compliments…as if I really do any work anymore…but neighbors come over and steal clippings! Now that’s the ultimate compliment!
My gardening secret… Conscious Neglect! Think it works on kids?
The close up