Gardening and The One-Body Problem

Confronting the reality that I can't do it all

Growing up and falling in love with gardening, I idolized iconic gardens and gardeners like Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst, Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter while devouring Beverly Nichols’ thoroughly delightful books about making his garden at Merry Hall.

As I became an adult, I always dreamed of the day when I would buy a huge property and build a HUGE garden with acres and acres of beds overflowing with perennials.

My current front garden blooming last spring.

Fast forward to me, now, at 41, living on a 7,400 square foot lot (687 square meters for those of you who use a rational measurement system) and… I'm thinking about that old dream differently. The desire for a massive garden is coming smack up against the fact that I am one person who has a job, hobbies and a social life. Okay… let’s be honest. The social life is kinda a lie. I don’t really like socializing with other humans. But! I do like to do things besides gardening sometimes! And the reality is that this piece of land around my house is quite enough to keep me busy gardening. If I had managed to land that 50-acre property of my dreams I think I would wind up being stressed out, exhausted, and the quality of the gardening I managed to do would probably be pretty poor.

Snapdragons in front of my small garden

The reality is that many of the iconic gardening spaces that inspired me as a gardening youth were not made by an individual. They were made by teams of people that a very wealthy individual hired. Did Vita Sackville-West ever, herself, actually, you know, pull a weed? Or did she just tell the gardeners to do it? Beverly Nichols, when he writes about making his garden at Merry Hall had not one, but two people working for him full-time. It isn’t that he had a maid who came in to clean once a week, or a landscaping crew who mowed the lawn. He had two people living in his house all the time gardening, cooking, cleaning, and mowing. Oh, and, of course, he hired additional people on a part-time basis as well. He actually had the nerve to write about how impossible it was to find good help to hire and complain that no one wanted to work anymore while he, a grown-ass man, had two other grown-ass men waiting on his every need around the clock.

So, I’ve realized, my teenaged dream of acres and acres of gardens is, in fact, an unattainable, and frankly somewhat gross, aristocratic fantasy. It isn’t just that I’ll never be rich enough to hire a team of gardeners: I’d like to hope that if I ever did get that much money I’d spend it helping people rather than buying an estate and being waited on by staff.

There's another issue as well. Beverly Nichols, again, has a famous quote about aging as a gardener. He said, “It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.”

‘Trena’ daffodils in the front garden I can’t wait to see increase into big clumps.

I love that sentiment, and a lot of it rings true to me. Every year, when my bulbs come up, there are more of them. Each summer the garden matures a little more, and each fall the fothergilla gets a bit bigger and more dramatic when the leaves color up. As my plants grow, I also learn more about gardening and get a little better at it each year: growing more and more interesting plants, successfully cracking the code on germinating new species, and learning from the design mistakes of my youth.

But for all the reasons I love that quote, Nichols totally misses the reality of getting too old to physically take care of a garden because, again, he had staff. Each year, as my garden gets better and better, I also move one step closer to the timewhen I’ll no longer be able to get down on my knees and do the necessary weeding to keep it looking good. When Nichols wanted to grow a bunch of plants from seed he handed the seeds to his gardener. I, on the other hand, take them myself down the basement steps to my grow-light-filled indoor nursery. Steps that, eventually, I won’t be able to navigate safely. Hopefully, that time when I can't physically care for my garden is still many years in the future, but it could also be next week. Physical wellbeing is never guaranteed.

I’ve been thinking about this, what I’m calling the one-body problem of gardening. The reality that, no matter how expansive my garden space, how brilliant my gardening dreams, or how honed my gardening skills, there is just one of me. One person with limited hours in the day and years in his life. But, despite that reality, I don’t want to give up on the oversized gardening dreams of my youth, especially now that – finally – I feel like I’ve gained the horticultural skills to actually pull them off.

I think I’ve found an answer to that conundrum that works for me and is actually pretty simple. I'm trying to find other people to do gardening with, not by becoming absurdly wealthy and hiring staff, but by volunteering and getting involved in local community gardening projects.

Inside my local conservatory.

In the city where I live, there is a rose garden run entirely by volunteers, (https://www.facebook.com/groups/349050635274815/) a whole network of gardens that produce food that is free for anyone to harvest from (https://www.theunitygardens.org), and a conservatory which was about to be torn down by the city but was saved by a group of people from the community (https://www.potawatomiconservatories.org). I’ve been getting more and more involved with the conservatory, and finding it incredibly fulfilling. In that space I can be part of making a marvelous garden of my dreams, and actually make those dreams reality because it isn’t just up to me – there is a whole team of people working together to make it happen. And even when the time comes that I have to give up caring for my home garden, I’ll can still go to the conservatory, and see the camellias I planted last week getting bigger and better and more flower-covered by the year.

Dividing extremely pot-bound clivias at the conservatory while volunteering there a couple of weeks ago.

The other thing that's wonderful about community-based gardening is you get to share it with other people. At the conservatory, I planted one of my favorite shrubs in the whole world – Osmanthus fragrans, one of the few plants that makes me wish I lived in a warmer climate because it smells better than anything else in the world. Finding a place to slip one into the warmth of the conservatory made me very happy, and I am even happier every time I see someone new discover its incredible aroma as they walk past.

Osmanthus fragrans ‘Fodingzhu’ aka the best smelling plant in the whole world.

So, my teenaged dream of a 50acre garden has transformed. I’m perfectly happy now to garden my small lot at home,and spend the rest of my energy creating beautiful gardens with and for other people in my community.