Gardens from Hell

When I was growing up, our garden, or 'yard' as we call it in American English, was a mess of tangled shrubs and trees, all planted in a crazily haphazard fashion. Our lawn had brown patches from lack of watering, and rather boring looking succulents, as my parents tended not to go for plants that needed lots of water and coddling, like roses. I gazed longingly on the gardens of our wealthier and more traditional neighbors: great pristine stretches of manicured turf, neatly laid out beds where weeds dared not show their faces, roses spilling over trellises, and windowboxes with artfully arranged flowers.

Or soil wasn't easy to create beds in, being mostly decomposed granite with many rocks, so my father planted a large cactus garden which quickly took over a large corner of our garden, a pepper tree, the roots of which cracked and buckled our asphalt driveway, and a paper mullberry, which sprouted countless seedlings with amazingly tenacious root systems. We also had a weird hodge-podge of fruit trees: kumquats, lemons, apricots and figs grew in abundance, and we were the only people in the neighborhood with a macadamia nut tree in the front garden.

Both my parents worked hard in our garden, but with full-time jobs, a harder-than- usual gardening situation, and children who had to be bullied and nagged into doing even the smallest gardening chore, our own yard quickly got the better of them.

You've probably heard it said that the process is more important than the product; our garden was a living example of this. Our figs, lemons, and apricots notwithstanding, our dandelions and bull-thorns could have won prizes. And yet I still remember sitting outdoors with my mother in the cool of the evening as she weeded, talking. Afterwards, we sipped iced tea and gazed up at the stars as we sat on the grass. She didn't agonize about the dried up patches in the turf or the obvious health of our dandelions. I know that the weeds, broken up driveway, and runaway cactus garden bothered her, but they didn't manage to ruin her pleasure in the garden. I can still remember walking around the garden with my father as he watered the lawn, listening to his explanations of fig pollination and lemon varieties. Our garden was far from perfect, but my mother and father obviously got great joy from it. I never realized it at the time, but I was learning a valuable lesson. Even if what you've got isn't 100%, it's yours, and you might as well learn to make the best of it. And if you can have fun in the process, so much the better.

My own garden here in the U.K. is in many ways a Scottish version of theirs. I have little gardening sense. I harvest giant rocks, broken pot shards and horse shoes from beds I dug up months earlier and would have sworn were rock-free, plant the wrong things in the wrong places, and tend to have a mess to show for all my efforts. I can't get my kids to do a lick of work half the time, and as I am loath to use pesticides or weedkillers, I don't get the spectacular results of some of my neighbors. Every day I pit myself against moss, dandelions, creeping buttercup, and daisies, but what great exercise it gives me! And besides, I've got apples and red currants too. Who cares if the apples are spotty and the birds get half of the red currants?

It's not perfect, but it's mine, and I'm determined to make the best of it. Out there with my fork and gardening gloves, my dolomite and coffee grounds and egg shells and homemade compost, I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Somehow I think my parents would be proud.