Apology to my Garden

I most humbly apologize to my garden. My intentions are not to ignore you, as I have; rather they are nurturing, loving. I WANT a magnificent, lush, planned, welcoming greenspace. I achingly study magazine layouts and garden brochures that flood my mailbox in the early spring months. I visit Mahoney’s and garden stores every May buying perennials, peat moss and potting soil, but it is all a sham, an unkept promise of commitment.

Gardening is not my métier. Really, I don’t enjoy it very much. I don’t like bugs and slugs, with which my yard abounds. Embedding dirt under my clean fingernails strikes me as counter-productive. Poison ivy, which I have trouble identifying, and DOES grow in my yard, has caused me too much itchy discomfort to want to get into the weeds and vines that threaten to colonize my property.

We live in a Beaver Cleaver neighborhood of manicured lawns, gumdrop hedges and abundant beds of impatiens. The esthetic of 1954, replete with picket fences and flags celebrating a variety of yearly celebrations seems to be the controlling design sense up and down the street. Several mornings each week, hordes of day-workers arrive in trucks hauling massive and noisy grounds-keeping equipment. The quarter acre lots are groomed as carefully as a Robert Trent golf course. Lawn and garden care companies easily meet their yearly profit margin servicing neighborhoods such as this one.

To compound my lack of skill, I married a man whose first job was maintaining a small-town golf course. He learned mowing, weeding and mulching early on, as well as developing a healthy animus towards lawn care. Keeping the grass clipped and manicured is not something he wants to spend much time or money on. A semi-monthly attempt with a push mower satisfies his greens-keeping inclinations and just keeps us from overtly insulting the neighbors’ efforts.

Living under an ancient, massive oak tree has provided us with a relatively cool house in the summer as well as acidic soil and deep shade in the yard. Grass does not grow well and, over the years, we’ve tried to minimize its spread. By planting all varieties of shade-loving plants our hope has been that these will fill in the brownish blemishes indicating spotty grass cover.

Our efforts have been more or less successful with regard to base-line maintenance. Country casual with a hint of vegetative anarchy might best describe the effect. Each year, though, I am less inclined to hunker down and pull out the onion grass that still threatens to overtake the beds of astilbe, bleeding hearts and a host of hosta. I’ve learned that the unidentifiable nasty vine that threatens the side yard has amazing regenerative powers that defy all my efforts to tame it. Clover and dandelions enjoy the proverbial field day around here.

I’ve been trained, like a dray horse, to look at my yard wearing (imaginary) blinkers. Plants that thrive, not the weeds, grab my focus. I have managed not to see the white flowers of the onion grass, the naked areas where ground cover didn’t make it through the New England winter and the leggy spikes of “Things that don’t belong”. Weekly, or so, when the weather is not too awful, I put on my gardening gloves, grab my forked poking tool and attempt to gain some control over my property. I battle with the endless cycle of oak tree detritus – pollen fronds, branches gnawed at by cut-worms, acorns and finally, the leathery leaves of Fall. Cleaning up – with a broom or rake, is a skill set I’ve developed nicely.

I am heartily sorry for my sins against the landscape. Everything I’ve read and heard about gardening promises joys unbridled, but I have yet to tap into that wellspring. I’m doing the best I can or want to do, and hope that the muses and fairies of the woodlands will forgive me. Perhaps they can find a comfortable home in the chaos we’ve provided. I’m thinking and hoping that the perfect austerity of the surrounding houses doesn’t offer them as much of an earthly playground as our feeble and generally unsuccessful attempts at bending Mother Nature’s will.