The Stuff of Gardening

Summer has set in with a vengeance. We've had no measurable rain in a week now and it's become very hot. I was watering our flowers today and thinking about what it used to take to keep the gardens up at our home in Indiana.

Apparently it took a lot more than I realized when I was doing it.

We have a small flower garden here in Ohio. Small by our standards anyway. The house in Indiana has more gardens than lawn. Last week I had a chance to get starts from some of my favorite plants when we needed to meet a contractor at the house.

The visit was a gardening eye opener. I couldn't believe the, well, "jungle like" quality of the backyard gardens. I used to compare the place to a jungle in terms of the lushness of our gardens. I can see how far off I was; NOW it's a jungle. Overgrown with weeds as well as desirable plants left to run amok.

I was stunned that less than one growing season could bring so much change! More noticeable, though, than the weeds (and with some topping out at 4+ feet they're noticeable), are the skeletal remains of formerly lush plants.

I don't know if it's last year's drought, the hard winter or a reaction to a hostile occupation. Whatever the reason there are multiple dead plantings throughout the yard.

One of my intentions was to get starts from the Japanese Anemones that covered large beds in front of both kitchen and living room windows. I like them because they bloom late in July and August and continue to bloom until October when everything else is gone for the season. They can be hard to locate at a nursery plus why pay for what we already own? I rounded the corner, spade in hand, expecting the usual July landscape of 3 and 4 foot tall anemones and I found...nothing. Bare earth. A closer exam revealed a few small anemones scattered through the beds.

I don't know if the tenant pulled them out, cut them down or just willed them away but they are pretty much eradicated. Seems odd that someone would go to so much trouble to wipe out something so pretty while 10 feet away the thistles are growing 4 feet tall.

When we made the decision to become landlords I knew one of my challenges would be to accept that someone else may not keep the gardens the way I wanted them kept. We even offered to remove much of the planting to make upkeep easier but our young tenants were certain they wanted to become gardeners.

I may not have properly conveyed just how much time is involved in the gardens.

I'm pleased that overall I'm not reacting much to the jungle-esque quality of the place. There is one tree on the whole property that I didn't plant; everything else was put in place by me. So I thought letting go of it would be a lot harder.

Now I think what's going to be a lot harder is the sheer labor of getting the jungle back under control from a property management view. I've realized the plants and gardens themselves are just more of the "stuff" that exists in life; we enjoy it, for a while we think it's more important than it is and then something real in life gives us a sharp **thwack** and we realize it's just stuff.

I haven't totally resigned my attachment to the stuff of life though; especially the esoteric stuff of nature. Four sad little Japanese Anemones replanted to our small garden here in Ohio are testament to this truth.