Summer arrived suddenly.
It was as if spring got shortchanged and we leapt from late winter into summer with nothing in between. I watched the gardeners wake with a start and begin tearing up their lawns and gardens with a fury, as if they had overslept and had to make up for lost time.
I do not garden.
I spent most of my adult life trying to convince myself that I liked gardening and I was just not doing it right. Gardening was never a satisfying pastime. I would plant things but had no interest in pruning or weeding or watering or fertilizing or whatever else I was supposed to be doing with whatever I had planted.
The results were predictable. I wondered why I had bothered to plant anything at all.
Gardening was supposed to be enjoyable, and the fact that it always seemed like work to me made me feel guilty. My mother and sister are wonderful gardeners, and I have no reason to believe they are fibbing when they say they enjoy getting their hands in the dirt, tending their flowers and watching things grow. I do enjoy watching things grow—this is the truth. I just enjoy it a lot more if someone else has done all the work.
Only when my husband, Peter, and I moved downtown to a condo, without a backyard or front yard or any yard at all, was I absolved from the need to garden, and it was an enormous relief. Every day, I walk around the neighborhood and enjoy the gardens everyone else plants and maintains. If the gardener is there, I always compliment them on their wonderful work. I take pictures. I literally stop to smell the flowers.
I spend far more time enjoying other people’s gardens than I ever spent enjoying anything I planted. If I had planted it, I was only aware of the weeds I had neglected, how one plant or another was languishing, and how I would have to do better next year. If it is someone else’s garden, I just admire what is in front of me—right then and there.
“My tulips are going crazy this year!” a man told me earlier this spring. “I don’t know why!”
I don’t know this man at all except for his garden. I regularly stop to admire his flowers, and this year they are particularly impressive.
“Don’t you think it’s because they are getting so much more light?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you just took down that birch last year, didn’t you?” I remembered the birch that had been slowly dying and, sadly, had to be removed last summer.
“You’re right! That was just last year. I suppose that’s it.”
I was glad I had solved the tulip mystery. The man went on to show me what else was doing well in the new sunlight, and I wondered if there wasn’t a place for a person like me in the gardening ecosystem.
Not everyone needs to plant. Some of us are here to enjoy what others have planted, to offer reassurance that their efforts are appreciated. I am an enthusiastic supporter of the gardeners in my neighborhood. I am attentive. I applaud when they do well. I am untroubled if all their endeavors are not successful.
“Nice work!” I told a woman creating a new garden in the front of her house.
“Well, it doesn’t look like much now…” she said.
But she knew I’d be watching. She knew I’d walk by every day and watch her garden grow.
Till next time,
Carrie