Time in a Garden: Just let it grow
We owe this one to my intrepid late-life gardening spouse: “There’s no rhyme or reason to this. Just let it grow.” He picked up that bit of wisdom somewhere, he thinks, as we listened to one British garden show or another. But the phrase also turns up in a Lorax song by that title.
Whatever the source, as I look back on this summer’s gardening season, I can fondly say: my garden took that bon-mot to "grow" to heart this year. It just grew, seemingly effortlessly — despite a June drought and unseasonable July heat that should have waited until late August. Even the year-end takedown of the garden way too early a week ago proved relatively painless.
Part of summer’s roaring success can be traced to the phenomenal help I had a year ago in fall, putting the garden to bed. It took four of us two days back then — ancient history — to weed, chop, edge and transplant. But all the resulting hard work paid off in spring of 2023 with weeds at a manageable level ... a state of things that persisted much of the summer. I cannot remember a time when those unruly beds of mine seemed to flower as easily or as long.
Bottom line, spontaneity and serendipity are wonderful gifts to the gardener and the garden’s beholders. But behind the scenes, it is still hard work that makes the whole thing seem so "natural."
A master-gardener friend of mine who for years headed up our local garden crew once said: “For every weed you pull in fall, you avoid a handful in spring.” Wise words, indeed.
And so as the rains come, the nights grow cooler and the leaves cascade onto my slumbering garden, I still walk the beds, clippers and trowel in hand. Pull a weed here and there. Move a crowded plant into a patch of bare dirt revealed now that most of the foliage gone for the season.
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“Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art,” the British poet Oscar Wilde once wrote. And sure enough, he too was a gardener.
His fairy-tale, “The Selfish Giant," chronicles the story of a giant who leaves his garden behind for several years. While he is away, children play happily in that beautiful space, but when the giant returns, he scares them away. As a result, the next growing season, the garden cannot escape the clutches of winter until once again the children are invited back into the garden.
The flowering is intense, except for a solitary tree that a little boy tried to climb and failed. Gently the giant lifts the boy skyward so that the tree can reach out to embrace him. Giant and boy share the moment, grateful to each other for the shared beauty they have unleashed in the world.
Gardening can be spontaneous but even that requires hard work, shared work, at times. But then so is anything we choose to love.
Author of the 2006 regional best-selling novel "Time in a Garden," Mary Agria has won six consecutive awards from Michigan Garden Clubs for feature writing since 2017. Her "An Itinerant Gardener's Book of Days," gardening novels and books on gardening and spirituality are available online and from local bookstores.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Time in a Garden: Just let it grow
