…& The Power of the Seed. Timing is everything. My garden, like my home, is officially bigger than I am. It’s more than I can take care of alone. I have been guilty for years about being cheerfully optimistic and over ambitious. And, frankly, I got sidetracked for a few years while I was the primary caregiver for my parents and my kids at the same time. A few years of benign neglect and turning my garden over to the garden fairies and the grey squirrels and I have something that is an exuberant weedy jungle that would make most suburbanites cringe. It’s full of great plants, but, after 15 years, it is in need of editing.
It won’t happen overnight. It shouldn’t. I’m dealing with years of neglect and a lot of beds of shrubs and perennials. My life is not a reality TV show and there is no rescue or end in sight. Many of the plants in my garden have a story to tell. Some are divisions from garden friends who have been generous with plants and seeds. Some were shrubs or trees that were planted in honor of family members. I can walk through my jungle and look at it with love and remembrance while my friends politely smile at my foolishness.
So, after years of begging, my husband actually got me 8 yards of mulch for my birthday this year and the reclamation project has begun. It’s not happening all at once, just a bit at a time. I am strategically working on the parts that bug me the most, are the most visible, or are reaching critical mass. And I coax the rest of my family into participating now and again.
One of the big To Do’s on the list is weeding. The Need to Weed. I’ve got baby trees in beds. I’ve got nut sedge, ground ivy, knot weeds, various grasses, and a few things whose names I haven’t looked up yet. There are also wild and uninvited morning glories, wintercreeper that somehow manages to disguise the poison ivy, and some lovely perennial ground covers that I planted naively and now have to eradicate because they behave badly. I’m not much for chemical warfare in my yard. But, I do have a ½ gallon of a herbicide, which I reserve that for special circumstances (thistles). I’m more of a yank and mulch girl which requires sweat equity.
But my biggest rule of thumb in my lazy woman’s garden is: Don’t let the weeds go to seed. A seed is a powerful thing. If they drop seed before I can yank the parent plant than I’ll be looking at those babies for years. It is one of the big life lessons that the garden has to teach us. We must learn about the power of seeds. They become a living metaphor for most of your choices in life. We reap what we sow.
My garden offers me lessons and treasures every day. This year, I have tried to be more diligent in creating a photo journal of my garden fairies at play. I love taking portrait shots of flowers in bloom. They inspire me in the winter. My garden is a habitat for local wildlife. We are at the edge of a hardwood forest and near a creek. We are still filled with fireflies. The twin fawns who have been helping themselves to my hostas were waiting for me in my driveway tonight. My butterfly bush was filled with tiger swallowtails last week. It offers me moments of wonder if I am wise enough to listen.
And now, my garden is also mature enough (after 15 years), that I am redesigning beds, removing, pruning, or transplanting overgrown shrubs, and perennials and I can be as generous with newer garden friends as old garden friends have been with me in the past. It is a comfort and joy to share plants and seeds with friends. I get to pay things forward by sharing plant materials, even as I deal with my weedy-seedy past.
