I am consulting with a client, now a friend, who called me up last week with a dilemma that I think we have all experienced as gardeners—a case of what I would call the mean greens. Like Holly Golightly’s mean reds in Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the mean greens are a generalized sense of angst and perhaps panic, not about one’s life, but about the state of one’s garden. A state of mind perhaps more easily triggered in the topsy-turvy politics of our times, when we are all one straw (or unplaced bamboo stake) away from breaking.
Her call, and a subsequent trip to her developing garden, reminded me of one of the reasons we garden, but also of one of the potential landmines that face us when we are creating a new landscape or even tending an existing one—a dread that one cannot see the end (or the end result) of all of the planning and work one has put into a project. Weeks of rain and heat have promoted the growth of jewelweed plants six feet tall that dwarf plantings underneath. Newly seeded vegetable beds seem to be growing more purslane than the heirloom greens we planted. These moments of despair are a part of the experience of a garden, and the agony that comes with them can only be relieved small by banding together, creating a plan of action, and getting back out into the garden.
As I counseled my friend, working with her to create a plan of action that combined progress on a few things and acceptance that others could happen further down the line, I watched her relax. As we determined that stabilizing a few areas, perhaps cutting weeds back, or smothering unmanaged areas with layers of cardboard and mulch to suppress weeds so that they can be addressed next season, we came up with a plan of things she could do now to make a difference. These included things (like laying a new gravel drive and adding a fence around her vegetable garden) that others could take on for her We decided she could do some pruning to delineate a few paths and plant a few woodies that she watch start to grow while the area around them became better refined, and most importantly she could learn to just ignore some things until there was time to deal with them in the months and years ahead. But as her anxiety lessened, I realized I was better at offering advice than taking it. I began to think of the unweeded, unmulched beds at home I felt were getting away from me. The back border, from which I have been struggling to eradicate wisteria and bittersweet, came to mind and seemed to be taunting me as I stood there comforting her.
It was at this moment that she stepped in and helped me to see that I, too, had a case of the mean greens and allowed me to see a path forward. I headed home with a to-do list in hand (as well as a to-ignore list), grabbed my Japanese hoe, and removed as many annual weeds as possible from a shady border on the side of the house that had been neglected in the heat of the summer. I removed jewelweed and purslane (reserving the purslane to dress a salad for lunch), only to discover a massing of small, newly seeded Labrador violets that had germinated amongst the weeds across the ground beneath the viburnums and calycanthus. As I cleared more territory, I uncovered seedlings of hellebores that I will move about the garden to mature and grow to flowering size in the years to come, and I will even set a few aside for friends to place in their gardens. As I admired the orange flowers of the jewelweed I was pulling out, I started to see them as friends who helped me move forward the population of native violets and hellebores in my garden. With that in mind, I headed inside to dress the newly harvested purslane for lunch.
So, now, what is the cure for the mean reds?
____________________________________
A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
