The perpetually imperfect garden

Jill Severn portrait

By the middle of September, this year’s successes and failures are apparent.

For instance: After all these years of gardening, I still failed to thin the carrots enough, and forgot to protect them from carrot rust flies. I overcrowded the butternut squash and cucumber vines, and now they’re tangled up in the tomatoes. These failings are frustrating and embarrassing.

However, I’m proud of the progress I’m making in the flowerbeds. Walking out my back door has lifted my spirits every morning since the bluebells bloomed last spring.

Summing up our garden year comes with reckoning and resolutions, or at the very least a renewal of good intentions.  Here is a vegetarian fall stew of them:

• Gardens need editing for the same reasons that writing needs editing. For instance, the book The Elements of Style famously advised generations of English students to “omit unnecessary words.”  They are the weeds in our writing.
  
  Vegetables we don’t like to eat are also 100 percent unnecessary. Ditto any ornamental plants in our gardens that, as Marie Kondo might say, don’t “spark joy.”
• The ideal garden is full, but not overcrowded. This typically means that if a garden is full in May, it will be overcrowded by July. The remedy is a resolve to thin seedlings in the spring, (especially carrots!) and then thin them again. It’s also a challenge to recognize that the young perennial or shrub you’re planting is going to take up far more space than you think.
  
  This challenge to imagine a plant’s growth is even more important when we plant trees. Why, I wonder, did it not occur to me that the little dogwood sapling I planted 20 years ago would grow up into the utility wires? And why do so many landscape professionals – professionals! – plant trees too close to a house’s foundation, or next to a sidewalk their roots will disrupt?
• Plants are portable. If an ornamental plant is in the wrong place, move it. Once the rain has nicely dampened your soil, you can dig up and relocate the perennials that need more sun, more shade, or more space. This is true through the fall and again in early spring.
  
  This is even true for shrubs or trees if they’re not taller than you are. Do this only if the ground is damp, and dig deeply to preserve a big root ball. It will be the measure of how big a hole you must dig for its new home. Water generously.
• Our taste – both in food and in ornamental plants –  changes with every passing year. Often we are barely aware of how we are changing, and what influences us. Paying more attention to ourselves and what lifts our spirits should be the gardener’s prime directive.  That requires improving our skills of observation of flavors, textures, colors, leaf shapes, flower forms, changing light, growing habits, and the infinitely variable relationships among them. The more we notice, the more we learn. Plants are effective teachers.
• Year by year, we are also learning to be better stewards of whatever plot of earth we cultivate. Most of us have probably paid more attention to bees, and to which flowers in our gardens attract them. We are also cultivating more native plants that provide habitat for native species.

We need to keep our feet on this path so that our yards and gardens support an increase in biodiversity. Government fish, wildlife and environmental protection agencies call this  idea “net ecological benefit.” It’s an advance from the previous goal of “no net loss.” It reflects the fact that keeping things from getting worse isn’t enough; we need to help the natural world get better.

Our gardens will always reflect the fact that we are perpetually imperfect human beings. Our failings will always frustrate us. But the redemptive power of simply watching plants grow will always be enough to keep us coming back for more.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com