I am swamped with design work, landscape installation projects, planting the flowers,  particular issues with different clients needing time and thought when time is in short supply, plant material and soil arriving, the store busy, the fabrication of custom pots, pergolas and sculpture via Branch-lots of work. Lots and lots of work, all jammed into that brief season we call spring.  This is not to mention dealing with the day to day life of three related but different businesses.  Some days I feel like I am manning the gardening desk at the Library of Congress. Other days seem like I am a garden traffic controller with too many projects needing to land all at the same time.  I got to work at 6 am today, took pictures of that great foggy weather we had early, posted the pictures, got the corgis squared away,  picked up a truckload of plants, helped offload another van load of eighty flats.  I have a big job to install tomorrow. When they figure out how to beam plants from one location to another, I will be the first to sign up.  Now I am writing and drinking a little morning coffee-its 10:30.  Most of the time, I would not have it any other way.  The spring rush around challenges me, and keeps me sleeping soundly at night. 

Warm days bring gardeners and non gardeners alike out of hiding. High temperatures last week near 80 that will persist through this week is too hot for me, but I do not get to choose.  That bed that needs revamping, the front door asking for larger, more welcoming pots, a spring event, a new addition, a rear yard landscape renovation, what tree for this spot, people with new homes needing a master plan, what flowers to plant-the phone rings regularly.  I am in a business that mostly makes people happy. Great outdoor spaces at home are welcoming, relaxing, interesting, companionable, interactive, personal-I could go on about how I feel the landscape and garden industry in this country helps make people’s lives better.

Designing and planting require some involved parties, and some time. Time to cook something up, time to let it grow.  No matter whether you plant an oak tree or grow alyssum from seed, there is a process involved that demands time.  Pots planted May 16th for a May 23rd party will, oh yes, look juvenile. If juvenile but beautifully planted works for you, then a summer garden planting for a spring event will look great.  Ready for company.  The expectation of a mature summer planting the end of May is asking for something no gardening person can provide.  I do not have the ability shift a planting into 5th gear, or engineer time travel.  I am a gardener; I know how to design and make things grow.  This is as close as I get to sitting on the right hand side of Mother nature.

It is my opinion that emergencies are limited to sick or endangered living things.  I will sound an alarm if a planting is threatened by too much water, or too little. Any living creature deserves my immediate attention if they need my protection.  This has to do with a belief in the sanctity of life.  There is nothing tough about figuring out what constitutes an emergency.  When a design and installation of a landscape or garden is important, it is not an emergency.  Things that are important, you take the time for.  People unwilling to put time to their garden-I suspect it is not all that important to them.  There are those requests for gardens, or pot plantings, that are not so much about making something grow.  They are much more about a moment.  Garden books have helped to foster this nonsence moment notion.  A photograph that depicts a garden on the one day a year when everything is perfect-that is the stuff that movie sets achieve.  The day the delphiniums are all in their glory does not take into account what comes the preceding months-as in replacing, staking, feeding, and so on-and even less about what they look like the five months after they are done blooming.  That one day of glory might not be repeated again for years.    The four alarm garden invariably has that look of having too much of everything put to it except time and thought.  They are fueled by an effort to create a crowning moment by artificial means.  To my eye, they are gardens noted for the fact that their slip is showing.  What slips, or slips away in a garden has everything to do with a lack of respect for place, season, and nature.

I take my job very seriously.  No small part of it is about explaining, educating, referring, counseling, interpreting, understanding.  The best part of my effort is that the landscape within my reach might be a fraction better.There is not much mystery to any of this; it is easy to see what is not important to me.  I have a tuna salad every day for lunch, and have for at least 3 months now.  I do not subscribe to Popular Mechanics or Vogue. I did watch my fountain being rebuilt, but I cannot sit still long enough to watch a tv show from start to finish.  Others who do not care about gardens how I do-they don’t bother me one bit.  Its just likely I have little to offer them.  My design advice-figure out what is important to you, and be sure you aim for that.   Should you need a moment, ask for one-do not ask for a garden.  If you like lifelong projects guaranteed at some time or another to be mired down by failure, weather, bad luck, frustration, and disaster that requires just about every ounce of energy you have, a garden will be the perfect thing for you.  When your best laid plans for your garden are crashing down around you, take some comfort in the fact that your thoughtful time and effort to create beauty benefits all.

Buck and I were talking the other night about age-it is a topic, as I am due to turn 60 in a month.  He is not only well past that 60 thing, he took that moment in stride. How did he do that?  Grace under pressure, he says.  Raised in Texas in the 50’s, his role was to provide and protect, seamlessly.  This meant no wringing of hands in public. He was also raised to clearly distinguish what issues to pursue, and what issues to drop.  What a gift that was!  Our desultory discussion Friday night-were it a matter of choice, what age would each of us choose?  He decided thirty-I spoke for fifty.  To be thirty again, no thanks. 

My thirty-fraught with wrong headed assumptions.  My ideas about just about everything missed the mark in a way I would not even half way figure out until I was fifty. That hangover from my twenties-the notion that the world revolved around me-still hung on.  My penchant for subjecting everyone around me to lengthy and overwrought discussion, mostly revolving around my oblivious self,  seemed so righteous at the time.    How anyone put up with me-how I got through the day; I have no idea. I created conflict with no plan for resolution. I was thoughtless more times than I should have been.  I believed my point of view on every tropic was the correct point of view, and I spent a lot of time disseminating, persisting,  persuading, enforcing, pleading and pouting-and other such ridiculous expenditures of energy.  All of this-in the interest of control.  Embarrassing-yes indeed.  The aforementioned is quite different than having a passion, and the courage of one’s convictions.  It was just about being what it means to be thirty. The best part of my thirties was the boundless supply of energy I had to dig up acres of grass and heavy clay soil, and plant.  I gardened non-stop, and did most of the work myself.  I learned a lot about horticulture and good plant practices, as in I killed enough clematis to finally learn how to properly site and care for them. 

My forties were better, more focused and intense- and much more fun.  I had already owned my own business for four years-that was the best fun.  The process of getting an endeavor up and running is absorbing, and exciting.  I was making enough money to live, yes.  But just as importantly, I was making enough money to be able to move on to the next group of projects. Pilgrim’s progress, as it were.  No first effort is one’s best effort, unless you happen to be Issac Newton or Leonardo da Vinci, Carravaggio or Shakespeare. I had worked long enough to see some landscapes start to grow up.  My right choices got to be a more regular thing.

The element of age in a landscape is a vital element.  Once a symphony or a book is written, it is exactly what it will always be the moment it is finished. Some painters paint and paint over a single canvas many times, but once they lay down their brush, the work is finished, complete.  If a landscape looks the best it will ever look the day it is finished, then it has not been done properly. Every gardener has seen landscapes overgrown and out of control only a few years after planting.  Too many plants planted too close together to start-I see this regularly.  It is difficult to invest what it takes to install a landscape, and then endure that it look years away from maturity-but that is precisely what it takes.  I am sure at one time or another most parents feel they have invested everything they have in a child still light years from maturity; this can be exasperating.  I myself have patience for nothing save a garden.       

Close up on a sixtieth birthday, I realize that I have no control over much of anything, save my own behavior.   My landscapes have taken turns I did not foresee-many for the better. Some things need revision-I like the tinkering part of gardening.  I visited a landscape I installed some years ago today-I am happy to see it is looking very good.  I have landscapes still prospering from twenty years ago-this is even better.  There is something  right about a landscape that is ageing well.  Would I really like to be turning 50-not really.  I would not be willing to give up the things I have learned, the people I have met, the projects I have done in the past 10 years.  Those ten years are part of a whole life that will need be put to my sixties.

The shop has been full of people all weekend, in search of something just right for a beloved Mom. You can tell the ones whom that perfect gift has eluded them so far; they have that worried look. Any offer of help was met with a smile.  I always ask if the Mom is a gardener.  Surprisingly many are not-so why shop a garden shop?  There is that instinct to buy a plant or some flowers for a Mom, gardener or not. This seems like perfectly right thinking; Mom’s and gardeners devote much of themselves to making something grow. 

My Mom was a microbiologist, virologist, teacher-and great gardener.  She grew most every tree on our 50’s suburban lot from seed.  And mind you, no maples; we had gingkos. Yes, I am bragging.  She was, however, a reluctant Mom.  I actually think she would have lived a long and happy life had she skipped the children thing-but she didn’t.  A shy and retiring scientist, we three appalled her in most every way.  I never slept, and never shut up; her gift to me was teaching me to read when I was three. Though I am sure she did this in self defense, I have had a lifelong love of reading, and most likely always will.  She read to me long after I was able to read on my own-this was quality time.  She saw to it that I was well educated, and then went on to entertain each and every one of my hairbrained schemes seriously.  I did try to be like her-thus my split college degree in biology-and literature. My gardening is very much like her; my designing is very much like me.  I can only recall her being completely exasperated with me a few times.  She could make anything grow-including me.

I guess this makes me a fan of Mother’s Day; in my parallel world, this holiday would also be known as Gardener’s Day. When I stop to consider the collective effort to plant and nurture that been my privilege to observe and or participate it-I am struck by the volume and passion of that effort.  There are many other gardening people out there, busy raising vegetables, planting trees, growing flowers, teaching gardening to their kids, weeding, deadheading, pruning, planting, moving things around, dreaming and scheming what would make the landscape a better place to be.  The sheer physical work of it is enormous; the sheer delight in the process and results of it even more so. For fifteen years I owned five acres of property in Orchard Lake-my purchase of that property and house in an advanced state of neglect was one of the few times my Mom lost all patience with me.  Though I would never want to repeat what it took to make that ruin of a house liveable, and plant three acres, that work enabled me to start my own landscape design and installation business.  Years later the sale of that property enabled me to buy the building and land that is now home to my shop.  Sometimes on a lark, I will drive by. A new house went up over a field of some 300 peonies-who could have enough peonies, if they had the room? They are one now, but not my memories of them-glorious. The wild garden is more than wild now.  But the orchard is still there, and the little trees are now big trees.  I am satisfied that I left that property much better than I found it. 

This Mother’s Day weekend was a very special one for me.  A dear friend that I had lost track of, and had not seen for 20 years appeared at the shop on Saturday.  My Mom so loved Denise; I feel quite certain that she had an invisible hand in her decision to get in her car and drive up here from Kalamazoo to see what I was up to.  I recognized she and her husband instantly-funny how that works. I was shocked to tears to see her after all these years. We spent no small amount of time talking about the trip that she and I took with Julia to see the lotus in bloom in Monroe.  Nelumbo Lutea is native to Michigan.  A sizeable stand of it is owned and protected by the Ford Motor Company, this just one of countless things that Ford Motor Company nurtures. Denise is a well known artist, and was keen to paint those lotus.  Julia, in her signature denim jumper and keds, waded resolutely into that slimy marshy water in search of some good photographs. As Denise said-it was the biologist in her coming to the fore.  No muck or snake was going to stand in her way.  She was so careful to step around each plant. I vividly remember that denin jumper floating around her like a tutu.  Thanks to Denise, I had my Mother’s Day visit with my Mom.   But even more importantly, Denise reminded me how important it is to nurture those things that matter.  She made that effort.         

Julia passed away unexpectedly and quietly in early May of 2002; few days go by that I do not think of her.  I am quite sure she has a rocking garden where she is now, and that she keeps up with what I do.  Sometimes I can feel her questions-but I always feel her approval-her hand placed quite squarely and resolutely  over my shoulder.  Should you have an interest in seeing Denise’s work-including a pochoir of that lotus from so many years ago, click on the link.  http://www.kazoopainters.com/Denisepochoirs1.html

 I hope your Mother’s Day was as wonderful as mine.