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Artful shopper: Gardening is life

A decade of shared purpose in the yard yields rewards

Linda Brazill  —  6/09/2007 9:05 am

Today marks 10 years to the day that my husband, Mark, and I broke ground for our pond.

Well, we didn't actually break ground; a John Deere back hoe that barely fit between our house and the neighbor's did that.

It was the very first, very scary, very big step in our garden odyssey. And that was after 2-1/2 years of reading, touring gardens, taking classes and making plan after plan until we decided we'd figured everything out we needed to know.

Mark said he'd commit 10 years to getting the garden established; then he'd be off to other projects. "My" garden would be done, and so would he.

We didn't know that "gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age," according to poet May Sarton. "Quite the contrary," she wrote in "At Seventy."

We didn't know that it was a madness that could strike at age 50 and that we could both catch it equally. Or that 10 years later, we'd still be hard at it.

And that might actually be the best part of it: How often do we develop a new and consuming passion at this stage in life -- one that leads to new knowledge, new experiences, new skills and new friends?

As we've become part of this larger gardening community, we've discovered we're not alone in spending all of our extra time, energy and money on the garden. The National Gardening Association says gardeners make up three-quarters of the U.S. population and spend $34 billion a year. Talk about growing the economy! We're doing our part -- one dwarf conifer at a time.

We moved to our current house because the lot had gardening potential. It was a half-acre located within Madison city limits and sloped 14 feet from the back lot line to the front curb. Best of all, it was an empty canvas; nothing but grass in the center of the front and back yards while the periphery of the lot was ringed with 50-year-old trees: apples, crab apples, spruces, Austrian pines, sugar and silver maples, arborvitae and a majestic honey locust.

The house was a modest ranch with big windows that faced the rear yard, and doors that let you walk out directly into the garden.

We started dreaming about gardens as soon as our offer on the house was accepted. A dream garden with everything we loved: wildflowers, English perennial borders, a rock garden, a Japanese garden, a little pond hidden in a corner. Those dreams ebbed and flowed and were abandoned as we defined what "garden" meant to us.

As artists, we came to see that gardening is an art like all others: It offers unlimited opportunities for creativity, design and inspiration. It also uses the same language of color, form, texture and scale as art. But with the added dimensions of time, space and weather, gardening is a moving target.

And as anyone who has made a garden knows, it's not about the garden. Like art, it's about the making.

The garden is the center of our days and our life. It's a place, an idea, a partnership.

A PLACE: The garden is our gym with offbeat options for exercise -- digging, planting, hauling stone and mulch, building walls and fences.

It's a yoga center, the place where we've learned that weeding is contemplative; a time to think through nagging problems, mull over decisions large and small or simply let daily concerns melt away. Though it may look boring or backbreaking, an hour spent on your knees weeding can be as good as one spent in meditation. (And that time on your knees is when you learn to recognize the difference between a weed and a seedling of a favorite plant.)

The garden can also be a vacation spot. Without ever leaving home, a garden lets us step out the door into another world -- one of green plants, trees and the sound of water.

A walk through a garden is an ideal way to unwind in urban areas; that's why people flock to parks and public gardens. But how much nicer to be able to do it in a place of your own making.

AN IDEA: A garden, like any piece of art, is an idea made tangible. But in the case of gardens, not only can you view it, you can enter the space itself.

A garden can be both a creative lab where you experiment with color, texture and form and a science lab where you can watch nature at work. You even get to do science projects like propagating and hybridizing.

If a garden can be an art object, it can also be the subject of art: in my words and Mark's photos, in drawings and paintings by both of us and those of our friends who use the garden as inspiration. Our interpretations of what we see outside our windows hang inside on our walls.

A PARTNERSHIP: If you look at the before and after pictures of our property, the changes are dramatic. But just as dramatic are the changes you can't see: the changes to the gardeners.

No one gardens alone; at the very least one collaborates with nature. But over the years we've discovered that many of our gardening friends have a partner or spouse who doesn't share their passion. Mark and I realize we're lucky to share an interest in gardening, but it also has taken us years to learn to really "share" that passion.

We're both eldest children educated for most of our school days at Catholic institutions. What this means is that we've both been trained since childhood to take charge, issue orders and set a project in motion.

From the smallest plant choice to the design of the tiniest corner of the garden, we've had "control issues." That barely suggests the collisions and conversations required for two people to create something new together -- whether it's a relationship or a garden. But out of our compromises has come an appreciation of each other's talents and a willingness to make decisions based on what the garden needs, rather than what one of us wants.

As the two of us walk around our garden in the evenings, I muse on Margery Fish, who described the trials and triumphs of the English garden she and her husband created in a little book called "We Made a Garden."

Ten years of trials and triumphs later, Mark and I can say, "So did we."

Linda Brazill  —  6/09/2007 9:05 am