garden-design
Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.
For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.
And it's a sign of age I think, that I start the day planning to get 5 things done, end it with getting 2 things done, and end up feeling like I've done 12 things.
If tending a garden has meant coming under the yoke of the seasons, my capitulation is complete; it is a willed captivity, however, perhaps like any other kind of passion.
It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.
But here experience speaks: never be too far away from man or machine until the sweep of the last [Bobcat] blade, for those who have watched these men at work will know about the amazing interpretations of a plan that can occur.
We're all experts in the garden, right up until the moment that we're not. . . .Every single time you try a new crop or new variety or new plot, you risk failure. Even with the tried and true, a year of strange weather can make decades of experience meaningless.
. . . A bunch of daisies has a peculiarly earthy smell, especially when it comes as a hot little gift in the hand of a child.
Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common.
There is something about a garden that brings out a fiercely possessive streak in the best of us. All our triumphs, to be really satisfying, must stem from our own individual efforts; and we look with a cold eye upon innovations for which we are not personally responsible. Even a suggestion, however tactfully introduced, is not always taken in good part. . . . We gardeners should not be blamed for this defensive attitude, which is based on the intense interest we take in our work. Without it, gardening would become an undertaking so laborious, so frustrating, so maddening, that there would soon be no gardens at all. As with all truly creative pursuits, the appeal is to the mind and to the heart, rather than to the pocket; and unless we can convince ourselves, beyond any doubt, that the credit is ours, and ours alone, we are like a singer listening to the applause for a song that someone else has sung.
Working the soil brings me back to my own nature, as I now understand that tending a garden is the same as taking care of myself.
We have to stand still in a garden and listen to its rhythms, look for the signs and symbols and meanings, hear its utterances. We have to look down and up, notice the needles and the haystacks.
What is life, and what is gardening, if one is not always ready to make new friends and make new experiments?
