To walk through a young garden in winter is a courageous act when the garden is your own, and the budget, diminutive. We forget how much frosting the active growing season naturally spreads over an imperfect cake – or indeed, how much frosting the resourceful amongst us can whip up with the aid of dramatic, fast-growing, but tender, subtropical foliage.
Royal icing will work magazine-worthy miracles in the kitchen, but that is nothing compared to a glorious threesome of Red Abyssinian banana drawing one’s eye away from a tiny but precious viburnum struck just two years before.
When the seasonal trappings are removed, and one is faced with deficiencies that are yet to be remediated by the skeletal remains of large specimens; or the gravitas of thousands of dollars’ worth of hardscaping; or indeed, by the comforting presence of a staff gardener edging pathways or schlepping compost, thoughts can weigh heavy.
I have been gardening long enough that I routinely look past What Is and visualize What Will Be, but I still suffer from these moments of clarity, and they almost always happen when The Brown and Grey Time settles in for the season. I am reminded that my garden is young, and I must fight against the urge of a once-younger me to feel inadequate.
My current garden is seven years old. Thirty years ago, seven years might as well have been forty, it was so remote. Today, it’s about the time it takes me to master a new software update. When I first started gardening, I would have been adamant that seven years and a strong work ethic would give me a fully mature garden in every sense of the word. What I failed to add to that equation was the phrase “and ninety thousand dollars.”
And that’s low-balling it. Unlike us, a young garden retains its youthful appearance longer when you put less money into it. How often have I found myself redoing tasks and setting back the clock because I didn’t have the budget to do them right the first time? It’s frustrating certainly, but it doesn’t mean we should wait to begin our gardening life until the funds are flowing or the sugar daddy is found.
What we gain from young, broke gardens is experience. Hard experience that cannot be bought. We learn skills from necessity: how to propagate, how to build raised beds and trellises, how to skillfully but ruthlessly divide our plants, how to carefully match precious plants to our soils, and how to enrich those soils without depleting our bank accounts. We fully absorb the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the individual eccentricities of our outdoor spaces in a way that others with greater resources cannot appreciate.
It’s work experience. Apprenticeship without the master craftsman or curfew.
But the good news (albeit bittersweet) is that time moves more quickly the longer one lives upon this earth, and compensates such loss with the unexpected gift of patience. You cannot watch a child go from babe-in-arms to bristly and beer-drinking without cultivating some perspective on the size of your viburnum.
Yes, I would love unlimited funds. Or at least the brazen insolence to apportion more of our household coffers to an ultimately ephemeral creation Nature waits patiently to reclaim. But in the absence of such reserves or resolve, I am no less served by the passage of time, the on-going cultivation of skills, and the very great gift of watching a tiny viburnum cutting come into its own. – MW
The Pleasures and Perils of Young, Broke Gardens originally appeared on GardenRant on December 19, 2020.
The post The Pleasures and Perils of Young, Broke Gardens appeared first on GardenRant.
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