At first I thought gardening would make me a master. A lord of the smallest parcel of land. My ego was wrapped up in all the memories I have of gardening and yard work with my grandmothers. Easy, I said. Just weed the weeds and water the rest. Gardening was like grooming— I spent a whole month ripping out whatever didn’t look right and patting the rest with encouragement. I wore loose cotton on my hands and knees and a rigorous confidence this yard was going to be a palace by June.
March brought rain for days. The rain brought all of the debris from uphill with it. A lesson, I thought. A lesson in patience and accepting imperfection. Gardening isn’t about making everything exactly what you want, it’s about caring for something an letting it become what it wants. Its an unrewarding challenge but I will grow from it, I thought.
April started with a bang. I got covered in Urushiol oil: the poison which gives poison oak its name. My face and ears swelled up to make me look like Shrek right as I was leaving town for a work conference. Imagine greeting a hundred or so colleagues while weeping yellow sap from your head. It’s from gardening I would say, as if my clumsy kid gave me a black eye. A Hail Mary of steroids later I find myself bloated and vibrating in bed wondering if its a heart attack or just too much caffeine while on steroids. Two weeks later I’m still finding new blooms of Urushiol’s revenge. Another lesson, I told myself.
The garden isn’t a playground and its not a place to role-play fantasies of cottages and eggplants. The garden also isn’t something to tame. It’s a part of the landscape where we choose to build a relationship with nature. I was cocky and naive and now I’m just itchy. Fair enough, garden. I will listen before I speak.
There’s something to be said of Australia’s 200 thousand year garden. There’s also something to be said of monoculture and its fear of the pest. Something for someone with far more years in the dirt to speak about than myself.
