A Beautiful Garden Takes Time
In the last two weeks I have gone on three garden tours. What a lot of green thumbs there are! The gardens were amazing. It makes me look at my own catastrophe I call a garden and want to weep.
While it’s true that when we first moved here there was no yard at all, just poplar trees right to the doorstep, it doesn’t excuse the fact that we have lived in our home for a dozen years now or that I have been a gardener all my life. Things should look better than they do. I am starting to think I have attention deficit disorder of the gardening kind.
A beautiful landscape requires careful planning. I’m afraid I am more of a doer than a thinker. No sooner do I have one area finished than I change my mind, rip it out and start over again. For example, the garden behind the house started out as our vegetable garden, then turned into an herb garden, then a wildflower garden and is now being worked into an ornamental garden.
The other night I wandered outside to check on the chickens and while walking past the rock arrangement I was creating up against the house I decided it was nothing but an eyesore. I stood there envisioning a flower bed filled with tall blooming things set against the log walls. How beautiful that would be! So I immediately started removing all the rocks.
A couple hours later all the rocks had found new homes in various places of the yard and I was back down to bare dirt. I was rushing for the wheelbarrow to start bringing in soil for the new flower bed when I remembered our roof is so steeply pitched that rain pounds everything to the ground while the overhang prevents what doesn’t get pounded from getting any moisture at all, making it a challenging place to garden. In fact, the only thing that could both hide the ugly foundation and put up with pounding rain and dry conditions would be a pile of rocks. Like the pile I had just removed. I tell you, it’s enough to send a person screaming into the woods.
To mess things up even more, over the years I was too often enticed by the idea of an instant transformation when it comes to gardening. I wanted to make my new garden look like an old established one but without the wait. This translated to invasive plants. Older gardeners would offer them up to me with trembling hands that had nothing to do with their age.
“Are you sure you want some of this?” They would ask for the third time in as many minutes. “It will take over your yard.”
In my head the words ‘take over’ translated to ‘full, lush and fast’. I would rush home tucking the weed-like plants here and there while visions of botanical gardens danced in my head. Of course I lived to regret it, just as the older gardeners knew I would.
Mix garden ADD along with all those invasive plants and you’re headed for a disastrous situation. For example I planted a bunch of goutweed on the clay bank of our pond. Goutweed is beautiful, but as its name implies, it is also very much a weed. However, I wasn’t worried since it had nowhere to go except the lawn, where mowing would keep it in check, or into the pond itself, where it would drown.
Then the pond leaked and went dry and we decided to have it levelled and made into a garden spot. I never dreamt that the goutweed would survive all the cat work. When the first sprout popped up its head in my new garden it’s hard to say which of us were the most surprised. Me, because I had forgotten all about it or the goutweed who suddenly found itself chin deep in rich garden soil. I could all but see it flexing and wiggling its hardy little roots in anticipation of a full throttle invasion. So I hacked off its head. But the roots run deep and I know it will be back. One day a young gardener will look at my lush drifts of goutweed in delight and ask for a piece of it and I will say with trembling hands, “Are you sure you want some of this? It will take over your yard.”