Morning Greeting, Giclee Print from my Original Watercolor
My passion for gardening is a relatively new interest for me. When Tom and I moved into our own house a number of years ago there were no real gardens on the property. I’d dabbled in the dirt a little at some of my prior residences, but now I wanted to get serious about gardening and this new place was an empty canvas waiting to be transformed.
With little knowledge of plant types, planting zones, blooming cycles, perennial verses annuals, I plunged into gardening with great abandon and started by hand-tilling a patch along side our garage.
I decided that the Heavenly Blue Morning Glories - they’re one of my favorites - would look great in that new bed climbing up the side of the garage. I would have preferred planting only blue Morning Glories, but since successful relationships are more of a democracy than a dictatorship, I relented when Tom chose the purple (I think they call them red, but they’re not). Blue and purple would look fine, I reasoned, at the time.
Little did I know, purple Morning Glories are extremely aggressive and virtually took over the garden, choking out my beautiful soft blues. Nary a blue survived that first year.
The second year we didn’t have to purchase a single package of seeds. The purple Morning Glories re-seeded themselves by the hundreds in the original flower bed and any other place the wind took a seed.
Volunteers, we’d taken to calling them and Morning Glories weren’t our only volunteers. We’d find Johnny Jump Ups, Giant Sunflowers and a random tomato plant coming up in oddest places. How cute they were and how grateful was I that any plant had survived my inexperience and now I was lucky enough to have volunteers!
How naïve, when as a novice gardener, my policy became, “Bloom where you are planted.” Oh what chaos ensued using that slogan as a way to manage my flower beds. A veritable jungle resulted, too tall things around the kitchen door, morning glories growing out of cracks in our walkway, big, bulky tomatoes choking out the herbs.
My ideal garden, everything growing in harmony, each in their own neat little bunches, no one infringing on the another was not to be. And that’s where the violence in gardening comes in.
These days I pull, cull, dig up and dispose of. What once was, “So cute growing here,” is now, “Sorry, you’re gone!” I hate that this gardening passion of mine has made me so hardhearted, it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
As a way to appease my guilt about the random execution of innocent seedlings and the not so random digging up and disposal of other unwanted plant species, I’ve established a refuge, a garden where the unwanted and unruly can go to live out their days in safety from the trowel.
It is the only way I can reconcile myself to this violent thing called gardening.
Tags: Gardening