When I fell into gardening I fell hard – like the first time I saw my children after they were born, or when I picked up my puppy and brought her home.
It was love at first sight.
It was also a creative outlet for me, a good physical workout, and very satisfying to create something beautiful where ugly problems once existed.
I called myself a passionate gardener. I didn’t have much knowledge, but I was motivated. And I loved it in an obsessive way.
My kids called me a crazy gardener as they’d often find me out in the rain building a stone wall. Or out in the blazing sun weeding a flower bed. Or out after dark with a flashlight hoping to finish planting before I tumbled into bed filthy and exhausted.
I called them ‘gardening orphans’ in the same way many women call themselves ‘golf widows’ when their husbands discover golf.
A workplace closure some years ago had me looking for another job. When I couldn’t find anything in journalism, I turned to my second love and eventually found myself on the gardening crew of a property maintenance company.
I thought it would be great to be paid to garden. I got strong – the fittest I’d ever been in my life. I kept up with my much younger garden teammates, which was personally satisfying. And I learned a lot about gardening efficiently and how having proper tools is a game-changer.
But after working eight, nine, 10 hours in whatever weather Mother Nature would throw my way, I’d come home exhausted. I’d fill my gullet, crawl into bed and do it all again the next day.
The downside of working as a gardener is that I lost my hobby. I certainly didn’t have the energy for my own place and my creative spark was doused.
I feared I’d never get my groove back.
I’ve now been out of the business of gardening for three years and I still don’t have the spark I once had.
If it’s too hot, I go inside. You won’t find me outside with a flashlight trying to finish anything in the dark. And if it rains? See ya later.
I’ve pared back my landscape plans as well. Simple and easy are now my watchwords. Life goes on if I don’t get all the peonies deadheaded and it turns out I can live with weeds as well – some of them at least.
The tide turned for me last year when I attended a garden tour. While some of you were missing live concerts and in-person sports events during the pandemic, it turns out what I missed was the garden tours.
That’s where you see your dream garden – not a weed in sight, every plant staked and deadheaded, lovely quirky objects d’art, varieties of flowers I must have.
Then I came home and surveyed my own yard. And I got planning and shifting things on paper and I swear my backyard is going to be spectacular when it’s done. Still reasonable, but spectacular.
I haven’t set a deadline. There are a couple of construction jobs that have to happen first. But when the building is done, the digging can begin and then the planting and then watch out.
I think I’ll be groovin’.
