Gardening

I have lived in a large city, in small dwellings, for almost a decade now. I am used to manicured lawns and plants that live in pots. How this came about, I don't know. My parents bought, and still live in, a house with a double lot; the second lot was, when I was a child, almost entirely vegetable garden, surrounded by fruit trees. Weekends were spent in the garden; some of my earliest memories are of 'helping' my father plant things, or picking vegetables straight from the garden. 

Gardens were plentiful. My grandmother had a large one, lovingly tended. My great-aunts, with whom I spent a fair amount of time, had a lovely one with lots of special rose bushes. The only relations who didn't have a garden were my father's parents, who had moved into a condo by the time I was around, but my father's father had grown up on a farm and had kept a garden outside of London to feed his young family through the war during the rationing time. They were no strangers to natural things.

Let's not forget for a moment here that my mother is a biologist by education and a park naturalist by profession. I should be a total green thumb if genetics bred true.

Alas, somehow or other I managed to miss the gardening gene. I haven't even managed to keep potted plants alive, either on my many balconies or in my office. I am allergic to places where people haven't tred, and feel bizarrely uncomfortable at my in-laws place, a 10 acre spread 10 miles from a small rural town. We are both throw-backs, The Man and I.

However, we live now in a place that has a 400 square foot patio with a great deal of greenery about. When we bought the place we saw all of it, carefully potted and trimmed and manicured and we thought -- well, isn't that nice! No lawn to mow! It's plants and bricks. We like it a lot, although I know it wouldn't be to everyone's tastes, because it seemed low maintenance.

ha ha ha ha ha.

Well, ok. It is low maintenance compared to what both our parents still cope with. It requires from us a few weekends work a year, which is nothing when you consider that my father has probably spent every nice weekend for the past forty years in his garden. But it needs trimming and pruning, weeding and clearing and cleaning and sweeping, and then something must be done with all the sweepings and prunings and in the end, it's actually work, not just a place to sit and enjoy. 

We are slowly putting together a critical amount of gardening tools, and slowly figuring things out, and I bit the bullet earlier today and, while The Man was out doing our grocery shopping for the week, The Boy and I went into the backyard and worked. For two hours or more, cleaning and trimming and sweeping and then cleaning and sweeping again. 

Those bricks that were so pristine when we bought the place were kept that way through pesticide, and we are not just morally opposed to poisoning the environment on purpose (any more than we already are), but also we have a small child here and putting poison on something he wants to run around on barefoot just seems like asking for trouble. And so I have a small pointy shovel to clear out the plants and the dirt and the moss from among the bricks and can I just mention that clearing between 400 square feet of bricks? TAKES A LONG FREAKING TIME.

But for all this complaining? It was really oddly satisfying. For the first time in my life, I kind of got how satisfying it is to work in a garden, to do something and see the difference, to have not just, for example, a clean house (as one does often when one puts in work) but a thing of actual real beauty to enjoy. And the work was almost zen like, moving from one brick to another brick, sweeping it up, starting again, clearing the dirt and the grime and the seedlings away. Very meditative and soothing, which is actually something I need more of in my life.

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Having said all that, don't think that I'm planning to ever get a larger garden. One this size, with this amount of work, is probably pretty much perfect. A few weekends of zen. 

And a lot more of enjoying it, just sitting back there, drinking a cider. Or for today, a margarita. It is the long weekend, after all, and lovely and warm and sunny here in Vancouver. 

Which is what I'm going to go and do now.