The Lazy Gardener
A funny thing happened when I gave up trying to be a good gardener. Not that I had ever been one – I’d never had a garden that people oooh’d and aaaah’d at. I was too practical to worry about beautiful placements and colour coding. But I would madly pull out clumps of weeds and prepare window boxes and have some pretty flowers that looked “just so” from the road, and would hope that everything grew big, because big was good. And I used to “clean up” my garden in winter and try to shape my bushes and trees so that they looked “pleasant” or something.
And then I had one of those crazy epiphanies one day. I was standing on a path with a small hawthorne tree in my hands, wondering where to plant yet another one. Val had dug this little shoot up and given it to me, but creepy-crawly feelings were wrapping themselves around my planting arm. I thought (and I can hear it now), “Someone will think I’m crazy if they see I have two hawthorne trees in this little side garden.” Yes! Imagine! What would people think if they saw me, alone in the bush on the side of Mount Elphinstone, with two haws growing away? And all those “weeds” and untied vines and crazy herbs that no one uses anymore? What would people think?
I realized that the stress of having a garden that others would approve of was taking more energy than was needed to support and enable a truly healthy garden. So I changed my ways. I started worrying about the needs of individual plants instead of how they looked. I started making sure the habitat for birds and bees made sense to them even though it meant letting the Pearly Everlasting grow all through my best garden bed. I let things grow in mixed clumps with whoever they happened to go to seed with. I let huge dandelions grow amidst the rare Chinese medicinals to see if it actually bothered them at all. I stopped pruning a lot of things that were growing into the paths because after all, a garden is for plants, and the people can just duck and watch their heads. I put showy, beautiful things behind the fence because they actually wanted to be in the shade.
And a crazy thing started happening – the plants grew in lusher and bigger than ever (now that my fat ego was out of the way), and the garden vibrated with insects. People, strangely, started to oooh and aaah. Things got messy, though; I mulched with anything I could get my hands on, so there is cardboard all over the place. But those mulched areas need much less in the way of weeding and watering. There are piles of wood chips right along the pathway, which is unattractive, but easy to access. Snake houses are right near the gardens, which give certain visitors the willies. But the slug-eating garter snakes are happy.
I leave my hoses out now, because real gardens have hoses in them. My little apple tree has branches hanging right onto the ground, which I refuse to tend, and the tree is covered with apples each year despite my lack of care. And in late summer I actually permit some plants to do what they naturally do during a late summer drought – curl up and die – only to return with great zeal the next spring.
It did occur to me that I might just be terribly lazy, and I also realized that humans feel largely unneeded when plants grow boisterously and joyfully without them. Sometimes I go out and meddle just for the hell of it. Keeps me busy. And keeps me in a place full of love and health, and with a lot less stress.
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