My garden was difficult to maintain after I found myself living alone, and then, during the years I was ill, impossible. I am obscenely fortunate during this plaguetime to have hours and hours a day to work outside. And that, it seems, is what is required. Hours and hours a day. Because bringing a garden back is at least as hard if not harder than making one in the first place.
Yesterday I cleared bindweed and shoveled compost into the vegetable beds. Planted some lettuces. The bindweed, though. Hours.
Years ago, my friend Mary’s mother, a botanist, walked through the yard with me, imagining possibilities. She was older, frail, and had a distinctively breathy and musical voice.
“What can I do about this bindweed?” I asked her.
“Well. There’s only one thing you can do,” she giggled.
“Yes?”
“Move.”
But I stayed. And the ubiquitous bindweed is… ubiquitous.
I am a slow worker and my efforts sometimes feel futile. The labor is intense, and I end every day sore and pleasantly spent. But, little-by-slowly, I am making progress.
On the phone with my son yesterday evening, I mentioned that all this time in the garden has made me aware that I was either naïve or willfully ignorant when I planned this space. It is frankly impossible for one person working outside the home to manage this much.
I work steadily for three or four hours a day, and then I spend another hour or two on less demanding labor—cleaning the patio, tidying the tools. So, essentially, this is nearly a full-time job. And, yes, I guess it was naïveté, not so much about the labor but about what is expected of us in this culture, in terms of work that takes us away from home.
Or maybe both, a naiveté and willful rejection of cultural norms.
And a hunger for beauty and life and abundance, too. Let’s not forget that part.
Well. Whatever it was that led me to decide to fill every available space with life, I do not regret it. And, in terms of maintenance, it wasn’t only a matter of time that led to the current state of rack and ruin. I am a nine-month employee, so you would think I could manage. But timing has also been a factor. For the last twenty years I have worked overtime from mid-March to mid-May. Last year I had two days entirely free in April, and they were not consecutive. And while my work days were often short, during my free mornings I was so overwhelmed, I could seldom decide where to even begin.
By the time I limped through the semester to commencement, the weeds had taken over. And, let’s be honest. Waist-high weeds are terrifying.
But there is a secret, too, another reason I have been feckless in my attempts at maintaining this garden, even before the Mortal Peril.
In my twenties and thirties, I used to plan my walks through the neighborhood so I could visit my favorite gardens. All our cracker box houses were built immediately after WWII, and they are not lovely. The cared-for gardens were few and far between—and even those pretty ones from back in the olden days are now gone. Over time, I met and chatted with the women who tended the three or four wildly creative gardens. One day I realized. They were all old. And single.
I was unhappy in my marriage, and while I longed for both freedom and a lovely garden, somehow I made a connection in my mind that was likely unfair and, in retrospect, as damaging to my psyche as it is straight-up humorous. I distinctly remember thinking, “I’ll be damned if I turn into one of these old women who pour all their passion into their garden because they can’t get laid, are incapable of intimate relationship.”
(Side note, and a story for another time, I learned during my six-week dating misadventure, immediately prior to almost croaking, that I could actually get laid any day of the week if I wanted to. So you could you.)
I have told only a few people about this peculiar connection in my mind, and even the telling was not helpful in letting it go, the conflict I felt about having a lovely, well-tended garden.
Who would have thunk it, that it would take a global pandemic for me to hunker down with my solitude, to make room for the idea that a beautiful garden and a fulfilling intimate relationship—these are not mutually exclusive.
In terms of the physical space, my work, as they say, is cut out for me. I will have plenty to occupy my time until I need to rethink my employment plans. And although I have not even begun to address the area in the way-back, the devastation from last year’s side sewer replacement, I do not feel overwhelmed. I simply take one section at a time.
I do not think often about after, about maintaining all this when we return to whatever is left of normal life, post-pandemic. Of course, sure, at a practical level, when my arbor chip dump comes through, I will mulch the areas I’ve reclaimed, and then, yes, perhaps I will be able to maintain the garden after—assuming, of course, I survive and don’t lose the house.
This is a dark possibility I prefer not to think about. But I woke myself with a start the other night, having dreamed I was making my own coffin, so some part of my mind is aware. The gardening engages the mind and body only during daylight hours, when it is critical to participate in the fact that life wants to happen.
In these strange times when our mortality is so close, so present, there is immense pleasure and comfort in a lettuce. Or in the ruby-stemmed chard I brought in from the garden last night for dinner. Or the long tangle of white root mass as I lift the bindweed from the soil. Or the small new buds on my Jude the Obscure rose, planted last week.
Or in the simple fact of springtime.
