I've been working in the garden this week - finally, it seems, since it's been raining non-stop here since March. As a consequence of both not working on it and the excessive rain, my gardens are a bit wild. (This is an example of understatement.)
The elderly couple who owned this house before us were master gardeners, and their loving work shows in the carefully sculpted perennial beds and specimen trees that cover our property. The specimen trees are gorgeous - gracefully weeping Japanese maples, exotic evergreens with curly trunks and soft needles, and others I couldn't begin to identify. Every spring, tulips, crocuses and iris pop up in unexpected places; for about a week in early May, the lower pasture is covered with a carpet of yellow and white daffodils. And during the summer, pink and purple coneflowers and lilies of every variety transform the yard into an open Crayola box. It's like being saturated by a visual showerbath of color.
It also means a lot of work. A lot. If I were smart, I would have gotten started back in February, but I didn't and now I sometimes feel as if I'm hacking a path through the rainforest, not weeding flowerbeds in Pennsylvania. (I also feel guilty - the folks who lived here moved to a condo in the next town, and I sure hope that they don't drive by. They might throw up.) And the thing about weeding is - as soon as you finish, you have to start over again, because the second you turn your back, the dandelions and the thistles will make a foray into the petunias again.
So to be a successful gardener, you have to be both relentless and endlessly optimistic. If you give in to despair, the weeds will win, and the next thing you know, you'll be strangled by ground cover. (One of several strange choices the previous owners made - planting ground cover and - why, oh why! - Boston ivy on the pool fence. A bad decision - think Audrey from "Little Shop of Horrors." Also, why on earth did they plant columbine - gorgeous, delicate, but an early spring flower - in the beds around the pool? By the time it's warm enough to go swimming, the columbines are dessicated stalks, still delicate, but withered and brown.)
There is also the desire, if you want to be a gardener and not just someone else's groundskeeper, to reinvent the garden to your own vision, and that means careful thought - what do I leave? What do I rip out? It's always sad to destroy someone else's loving effort and creation, but honestly, I really don't like sedum, and that ivy has GOT TO GO. So I've added here and there - and as always with gardens, my vision is a lot bigger than my pocketbook and my energy level. Gone are the days when I could start kicking gardening ass at eight in the morning and go non-stop until dusk. As for the cost, I tried growing from seed this year, but one evening, I forgot to bring the seedlings in from the porch where I had put them to harden. It got chilly that night, and the next morning I had two trays of shriveled-up twigs. Sigh. Life is a learning process, as they say. So far, I've added a butterfly bush and a bleeding heart, a mock orange, a pink climbing rose, foxgloves, delphiniums, purple and white sage, and lupines. Artemisia, too, and lots more lilies. Can't have too many lilies. But there is always more to do.
Foxgloves Black iris (weeds left in for contrast)
So, a garden is always and forever a work in progress. I've added and taken away and maintained, and I will never be done. And the weeding - oh the weeding! I think I've gotten a handle on the thistles this year (you've got to yank every one out by the roots, otherwise they just come back), but suddenly I'm battling barabarian hordes of dandelions. Next year, it'll be something else. There is no easy or quick way to weed - you have to get down on your knees and yank. And yank. And yank. I supposed there is something Zen in it, but I haven't found it yet. I'm still at the sweating and swearing stage. And it's so hard not to take it all personally.
Louise Gluck (sorry, I can't figure out how to make an umlaut), in her lovely book, The Wild Iris, writes about the inexorable attacks of weeds in this poem. As someone once said, a flower is just something you want in your garden; a weed is just something you don't.
"Witchgrass"
Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder --
If you have me so much
don't bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything --
as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy --
I'm not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can't rest until
you attack the cause, meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion --
It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.
I don't need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.
from The Wild Iris, the Ecco Press, 1992.
