High Maintenance Gardening

Because the work is the point

“That looks like a lot of work!”

Three different people have said this – or some slight variation in this -- to me in the past couple of weeks as they’ve walked past on the sidewalk. The work in question is me in the front garden weeding or planting or pruning or harvesting seeds or just poking around to see how things are doing.

It is a new sentiment. When we first moved into this house three years ago and I started ripping out the overgrown shrubs and clearing the choking masses of Lonicera maackii and Japanese knotweed, the neighbors just smiled and welcomed me to the neighborhood, glad that the house that had sat vacant for a couple of years was finally getting some care. When I then turned most of the front yard into a garden, they complimented me on how beautiful it was and told me how much they enjoyed walking past it.

But now… now clearly I’ve moved into a new and confusing phase. The weeds are gone. A garden has been planted. Why am I not just relaxing and enjoying what I’ve created?

To be clear, I AM enjoying the garden I’ve created, but I am still out there nearly every day working away: digging things up, moving them around, planting new things, deadheading, pruning, and fussing. I’m out there sometimes pulling out attractive, fast-growing plants and replacing them with smaller, fussier things because… well, just because! Because I want to see what they’ll do. Because I grew a bunch of things from seed and they need a home. Because I like gardening.

I know from the vast majority of books and articles on gardening that most people want an easy, low-maintenance garden. I don’t. I want high-maintenance gardening. I want to have things to do every day, plants to water, dead flowers to trim off, and weeds to pull. I want to watch the sheer magic of plants developing, growing, and maturing. I don’t want instant gratification. I want the deep pleasure of a long, technical, sometimes difficult, journey.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, think of running a marathon. Or knitting a baby blanket. Or putting together a puzzle. Sure, you could hop in your car, drive 26.2 miles, stop at a store, buy a baby blanket, and purchase a picture that hasn’t been cut into 500 tiny little pieces. That would be efficient and easy. But that’s not the point. The point is the doing.

And my neighbors have no idea just how much work I put into my gardening… Even if they saw the roses blooming in my backyard they wouldn’t know that I grew them from seed. And, in fact, that I’ve been making rose crosses and growing them from seed every year since I was a teenager.

In my back yard, I have a raised bed I’ve filled with sand that is home to about two hundred cactus plants, all of which I grew from seed. I have lovingly cared for these cactus as they have transformed from tiny, impossibly cute little seedlings into tiny spiny bumps and now, finally, years later, they are beginning to bloom. They are special species grown from seed I purchased from an incredible seed shop (alplains.com) run by a man who is always threatening to retire.

I love these cactus. They’re very beautiful. But I’ll be honest: if I could just walk into any garden center and buy them for a few bucks a piece I probably wouldn’t. I mean, I might buy one or two, but not hundreds. The process of tracking down the seeds, learning how to germinate and care for them and getting to watch them develop – that’s the great joy of these plants for me. When they bloom all that time, love, and care gets wrapped up into the beauty of each flower and make them ten times more wonderful than they could possibly be if they were just a cheap impulse purchase.

The same concept applies to the rest of my garden. I love digging up and redesigning a bed, putting in new plants, and watching them mature and develop. I love weeding a bed and seeing how much better it looks afterwards. I love pruning an overgrown shrub. I love digging up and dividing a mature plant and watching all the divisions develop into a big drift of flowers.

So, if any of my neighbors happen to read this, brace yourselves. If you love the way my front garden looks one year well… enjoy it while you can. I’ll probably be ripping it out and changing it all around next year. Because it all comes down to this: I love gardens. I really really love gardens. But I love gardening even more.

So yes, my garden is a lot of work.

That’s the whole point.