Trowel and Error

I've blogged about Dave's gardens before. Their rectilinear nature... their colors... their beauty, certainly, but also their rigidity.

Well, I'd sort of taken care of the rigidity part by not taking care of them at all. It had become a jungle out there. I had to walk the long way around the garage to take the trash out because I could no longer navigate the path through the gardens. The peonies and the cone flowers and heaven-only-knows-what had decided that the path belonged to them.

I had good intentions. But I would look at the gardens and not know what was what, feel stupid, and then go in the house. This, as it happens, isn't much of a gardening strategy. My dear friend Terri took pity on me. Or she felt vaguely unsettled by what I was allowing to happen back there. I think she might have thought the jungle would encroach into the house, strangle me in the night, and then creep back into its bed, apparently docile but really just waiting for its next victim. Clearly, she had to take action.

We just got started, but there are 7 giant yard waste bags waiting at the curb, along with several piles of dead branches. We lopped, we yanked, we pruned, we weeded, we heaved, we hauled. Tomorrow, I'm going to be hoping that aspirin is a food group ;) Sometimes Terri would say "that's a weed. Let's get rid of it." More often, though, she would say "what do you want? It's up to you."

IT'S UP TO ME???

Oh yeah. Right. It IS. I don't like hollyhocks, especially. She does. Some of them have gone to her house. I don't have to have them, just because they're planted here!! I do dearly love my lilac tree. So we tried to save it, even though disastrous things happened to it this winter. See all the stuff we had to cut off it?

There's still a lot to do. But today I remembered that I like to garden. I learned that if I accidentally pull up a poppy while I'm aiming for the weeds, the police do not come. I learned that I like to play in the dirt. I learned that these are my gardens now. And I can learn to tend them, nurture them, and help them evolve into welcoming, nurturing spaces.

Thanks, Terri!

And I love to garden with someone else who thinks that gardening involves sitting!