This spring I'm learning how to garden for the first time.
I feel like that's a little lame considering I'm 36 years old and have been a homeowner for nearly a decade. Alas, here I am. Learning how to garden.
Last summer the deer ate most of our hostas, we trimmed our hydrangeas the wrong way resulting in them growing unevenly and not very big, and our decorative grasses needed thinning so bad that they looked like threatening octopuses that would grab you by the ankle and swallow you up as you walked by.
I decided that this is the year when I plant some pretty flowers and actually learn how to maintain the beautiful landscaping we inherited when we bought our house. Last week I walked around the periphery of our house and immediately felt overwhelmed... there were weeds everywhere.
When I say everywhere, I mean they were literally overtaking our landscaping. I chose a spot to start, put on some gardening gloves and started pulling out the weeds. It was a LOT of work. Some areas were so overtaken and the weeds rooted so deep that I had to dig them out with a shovel. (Is this normal? I have no idea.)
Some of our decorative plants were so overtaken with weeds that I had to spend nearly 30 minutes separating the leaves and pulling the weeds out from the middle, trying not to uproot the wanted plant in the process. At times I thought it a futile task.
At one point I rounded the corner of our house and immediately my heart sank when I saw that one of our plants was so overtaken with weeds that it wasn't salvageable. It literally needs to be dug up and replaced. Sad!
This whole process has been a learning experience for me. You see, last summer we didn't have these problems. Deer and trimming mishaps, yes, but not weed issues. It was our first summer in this house and everything grew in beautifully. I thought that it was just normal for it to do that. This spring I learned otherwise. So after a few days of painstakingly pulling weeds, I walked sore-handed into Target to buy some gardening tools; a small handheld shovel, rake and pruning shears.
While at the checkout the lady ringing me up commented on my tools and asked if I'm doing some gardening. I told her I was, and that I was surprised by how bad my weeds were this year. She told me that this year her garden has never been so beautiful and low maintenance. Noticing my look of surprise, she said, "Well last summer during lockdown I spent a lot of my extra time in the garden pulling weeds. How your garden looks on any given summer is a reflection of the care you took maintaining and caring for it the previous summer."
That makes sense, doesn't it? Maybe you seasoned gardening folk are thinking ummmmm, duh? ;) So this year I'm not only trying to make the garden look good for this summer, I want to set it up to look great next year too. And because of last year's neglect, I've got double the work ahead of me.
I've started to think about how gardening is a lot like marriage.
It takes intentional tending. It takes proactivity and planning for the future if you want it to look good. You need to pull out the weeds as they come in, because if you leave them alone and pretend they're not there, they'll grow and multiply and overtake the beauty. And if it gets bad enough, you might even have to dig up something that used to be beautiful and replace it.
Lack of maintenance will result in the need for critical care.
All in all, you'll have to work a whole lot harder to get your garden looking good again. It will feel overwhelming, take a lot of time, and leave you sore for days.
I've learned this lesson the hard way- both with my marriage and my garden. Perhaps this lesson applies to all good things in life; that good things need the work put in while they're still beautiful.
