I imagine an order-of-things
when I plant—and by plant, I mean “invest”. Make no mistake, a garden is not a
cheap thrill, as I used to think. As Phil and I were standing at the cash of
the tree nursery the other day, waiting to zip the debit card through the
machine for an ungodly (to me) sum, I joked that over the years the garden has
surely racked up as many costs as our children. The cashier—seemingly unaware that
all that money she was counting was coming out of our personal coffers—looked
at me askance and asked if the children were very young. No!!! This is a
serious long term financial commitment! At least for my own green (brown?) thumb it is.
I plant with precision, with
purpose, with high and mighty hopes. I do all the research. I ask many
questions. I rely on horticultural advice. Every plant that has gone into the
garden has been thoroughly vetted. And still, year after year, plants curl up
and wither, they don’t thrive, they die in great spires of browning needle…
…or in slow spindly
inversions…
…gradually diminishing and
disappearing until one day I no longer remember I even planted them.
I spent all of Sunday and
holiday Monday digging out trenches between my stone pavers after a heavy
investment several years ago for the pavers to be laid and inter-planted with
various “hardy” greens. By this year, all I have left of those expensive greens
are dense and ugly weeds (some weeds, yes, I know, are lovely). After digging
in I realized the poor plants had maybe an inch or so of good soil over a bed
of 6 inches of pure sand—a sand bed is critical for paver stability, but not so
nice for lush growth. So I (or we, my daughters both helped!) dug down, peeling
the weed rug off the top, scraping any good soil off their roots, and scooping
trenches out of the sand bed that I could then fill with topsoil and embellish
with good plants. It was backbreaking (but also holistically heeling and
therapeutic) work.
 |
| Before |
 |
| During. This is Mother of thyme, which is supposed to fill in over the years... |
In my Zen meditations I
couldn’t help wondering why I kept at it, was I fighting a losing battle, was
all this work and money for naught. And then it all began to make a kind of
organic sense. All life is like this, isn’t it? You never know which of your
investments of time, effort and/or money are going to really pay off. So you
either never commit, never bother, just give up, or you roll up your sleeves
(and pull out your wallet) year after year and try, try again.
And you know what? In the
end, for all of the many garden investments that never ended up paying off for
me, there are many square yards of them that truly have. As tired as I am
today, as sore as my muscles are, I can honestly say that for me all the
weeding, all the sowing, all the dreaming, all the hoping, all the expense, all
the time, has surely surely been worth it. And today, today, I get to smell the
roses.
