from Trash Heap

When I first met my garden, it looked more like a fascinating trash heap. Filled with decades of debris, the garden sprawled through a double-deep lot in a neighborhood once known for apricot and plum orchards. The garden was a tangled tale of brush, broken relics of past gardens, busted glass and brick, reminders of a harsher time. Thorny blackberry vines and indomitable bamboo shoots forced their way up, like giant fists announcing victory. And that was just for starters. And so I came to gardening not as a visionary with the intent to tame and make order, but as an explorer, fingers roughened, dirty, and drawn to the excitement of discovery. The garden had something to teach me. I simply had to watch, listen, and learn what it had to say.

from Uninvited Guest

I still can’t say how they all landed where they did, much less where they came from—the mismatched shrubs and bulbs and unnamed perennials that dot this landscape. Despite the utter thrill of emptying my car of flats and flats of brand-new nursery purchases, when I surveyed my emerging landscape, it seemed as if most of the plant materials that succeeded and thrived had come to me by way of mystery.

from Letting Go

So much of gardening is destruction, eradication, saying no. Brown limbs have to be cut away, dead leaves removed. Even young, eager shoots must be severed. Perfectly good fruit must be plucked off before ripening in order to allow other fruit to peak. Death in the garden is rampant, celebratory, a pathway to the future. The task of gardening requires an equal penchant for destruction and creation, one following the other so closely they often appear to be the same.

from Regrets

Minutes later, or maybe hours, I begin to notice my muscles are sore. I slump down on a brick step or smack in the middle of a planting bed to catch my breath. From that vantage point I see that the rose campion has overtaken its pot and the gladiolas have out-distanced their stakes. I try to get up, but the shovel is blocking my knee, my shoes are caked with mud, and a rose thorn juts dangerously close to my elbow. Besides, I’m too exhausted to move. But I’m not ready to stop. Not quite yet. Not as long as the light lasts.