Patience…

A handful of years before my dad passed away, we planted an ornamental crabapple and an edible fruit-bearing tree at his property in Alstead. On a gently sloping grassy hillside, I could see his vision of how they would look as they matured. Dad was getting quite on in years, so it didn't surprise me when he said, "I'll never see them looking like much." Several years before that, shortly after my mom had died, he had left his little farm down the road to move into this current one. With 30 years of cultivation, my parents' farm was filled with all kinds of trees and shrubs they loved, and the landscape finally felt mature. The magnolia next to the driveway was a 20-foot burst of pink-white blooms at the end of April. The orange Oriental poppies were an impressive row of blazing orange you could see from the road and the climbing rose that clambered over a garden arch was so mature, a friend of theirs volunteered to come by every spring and prune it for them. All those years… the weeding, the fertilizing and the pruning. When a garden reaches maturity, it's a whole-hearted sense of accomplishment and appreciation that washes over its ever-ambitious steward. The art of gardening is more than cultivating the soil. It's cultivating one's own maturing and ability to appreciate that these beautiful landscapes require time and patience as much as they require rain. I visited a mature garden in Acworth that was on the Garden Conservancy's annual garden tour one year, and oh, was it a beauty. The trees and shrubs created the structure of several separate yet connected "rooms" in the landscape and the way the perennial beds and hardscapes spilled across the property, visitors were drawn through the gardens as if being led by hand even though it was a self-guided tour. I admired a weeping larch, Larix decidua "Pendula", with its cascading branches of lime-green needles that would make you think it was an evergreen even though it was deciduous. It towered over my head and must have been decades old. I left the tour as a light rain descended yet couldn't help myself from stopping at a nursery vendor set up near the designated parking area. The vendor was Morning Star Perennials out of Rockingham, Vt. He had really cool, unusual plants and shrubs for sale and I was thrilled to find a very small, young weeping larch that I couldn't resist and went home with. A week or two later I visited the nursery and was spellbound by what he had to offer. I loaded up my car with a male and female kiwi vine, a deciduous shrub, Calycanthus "Aphrodite," and a sequoia tree. I thought sequoias only grew in the Pacific Northwest! My own gardens here in Dublin are still on the immature side. I'm constantly making changes. Ripping plants out that aren't thriving, moving plants and shrubs, vacillating on what kind of mulch to use, enlarging beds, reducing beds, and in some instances, giving up on beds and just waiting to see what happens. You can't force moss to grow on that concrete planter any faster than it's naturally going to do just like I can't force all that pachysandra I planted over the last two years to flourish. It simply doesn't like all the sun exposure it gets. I had a vision of it in a secondary bed encircling a mixed perennial bed but it's just not meant to be. All of this is just part of the way gardens evolve and mature over time. It takes all kinds of trials and tribulations but most important is time. My little weeping larch is still just over a foot tall. It's got its beautiful weeping form and one day will be quite striking. Right now, it tells me to just remain patient. In the meantime, I'll go out and prune the heck out of my female kiwi vine. She's like the smog monster from some old Japanese movie, ripping down the boards and wire of my enclosed cutting/vegetable garden. Her branches are curling tentacles reaching out in every direction, waiting to wrap around any object she touches. Like Medusa, she's testing my patience in a whole different way.