That time of year again

My column, published in airdrielife magazine (http://airdrielife.com/), Spring 2011.

Gardening, like learning a foreign language, comes easier to some than to others. I am one of the others. I don’t like gardening. There, I’ve said it. Admitting to not enjoying gardening comes close to supporting non-breast feeders on the scale of societal abominations, but let’s be clear. I like gardens and I like planting things and watching them grow. However, I have no aptitude for picking the right plants for the right spaces, I don’t like mucking about in the soil, and I don’t like watering the little sprouts while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. However, a certain amount of gardening is necessary if I want to enjoy my yard.

I usually start out with a burst of energy in February. With lengthening days, my tiny sprouts, carefully planted in milk cartons and little peat pots, are primed to burst forth in time to transplant to planters and beds. But this is optimistic. Year after year, I start plants only to have them wither, possibly from lack of water, light or both. I prepare the soil and plant bedding out plants from the nursery with only slightly more success and when tender, delicate perennials poke through in other people’s gardens, my hardy ones remain dormant. Not a crocus to be found. Sometimes a rare tulip pushes through, only to be frozen by a late frost that somehow doesn’t hit the tulips in the yard across the street.

Years ago, I gave up on anything fancy. In my yard, I have peonies, daisies, a few day lilies, a couple of hardy rose bushes, a poppy (yes, just one) and several lovely plants whose names I can’t remember. I have low-growing snow-in-summer planted behind towering day lilies, ground hugging campanula ensconced near the roots of a seven foot rose bush, a Virginia creeper that, rather than cling to brick as my neighbour’s does, flops lamely along the fence. I dig and poke, but not with much enthusiasm. There seems to be more weeds than plants and mostly, I can’t tell the difference.

People tell me I have a lovely yard, due mostly to the lawn, kept manicured by my husband. At least that part is tidy. When I visit other gardens, with flowers blooming in rows, dancing like well-dressed maidens in the breeze, I am in awe. I make plans – next year my garden will be like this. But when I return home, to my lawn swing, my cup of tea and my book, and see the unorganized wildness of determined perennials, violas thriving in sidewalk cracks and under the swing, surprise plants – gifts that have arrived in bird dropping, and the disorder growing around me, I am not tempted to change it. Somehow there is comfort in the confusion.