My illusions have been not lasted. Last week I went out to weed the front corner garden — the one with the ‘Betty Corning’ Clematis; the ‘Snowflake’ double-file Viburnum that blooms from May to October; the dwarf white pines; the creeping (wrong word for this expander) Scotch pines; and the various lilacs, dwarf, reblooming, and ancient. I have for many seasons now considered this part of my project “finished.” Dubbed my “Pinetum,” it requires little maintenance, the mix of plants pleases me, and, except for the vigorous Scotch pine, the rate of growth has kept the plants in proportion to each other.
As a corner garden, however, it is something of a show piece, and to pleasure my neighbors I have tried to create a colorful planting in the part of this garden that faces the side street. I have relied on multiple varieties of daylilies and the sedum ‘Autumn Joy.’ This summer, the rain has kept the deer away as the daylilies have come into bloom, and the color has been stunning. Arriving last week with my weeder, however, I discovered that the grace period was over, the four-foots had come back, and every blossom, every bud was gone. Calming down and taking a harder look, I realized as well that daylilies were no longer the right plants for this garden anyway. I just went out to weed and I ended up doing a major redesign.
Once again, I learned the hard truth: where the garden is concerned, one is never “done” and “perfect” is a word best struck from the gardener’s vocabulary entirely. Last Friday, Kevin and I tackled the corner garden. We pruned the overgrown lilacs, dug out daylilies, edged the bed to accommodate the voracious Scotch pine, and analyzed my plan for a redesign. A passing neighbor stopped to compliment us on our work. “Looks perfect,” she shouted. “Looks better than it did,” we replied. And then we laughed, acknowledging that this is actually our measure of success.
Nothing in the garden will ever be perfect, or, perhaps, if perfect for a moment, not perfect for long. Our art involves the living tissue that will not stay in place or remain the same from month to month or year to year. The dwarf lilacs refuse to stay dwarfed, the creeper continues to creep, the deer devour the daylilies, and my replacements as they grow may fail to harmonize.
In my work, however, I am comforted by a lesson I learned from garden designer,Julie Messervey whom I first encountered through her book, The Inward Garden. Messervey believes that “deep within each one of us lies a garden. An intensely personal place, this landscape grows from a rich blend of ingredients – imagination, memory, character, and dreams – that combine in wonderful ways in our innermost selves.” As a designer, Messervey sees her work as giving outward form to these inward gardens, though the translation may never be perfect.
Messervy trained for two years in Japan learning the art of the Japanese garden. At the heart of this art lies a perception about “perfection.” Here is the story as it is told many places:
“Centuries back, in the height of the Japanese autumn, in one of Kyoto’s majestic gardens, a tea master asked his disciple to prepare for tea ceremony. The young man trimmed the hedges, raked the gravel, picked the dried leaves from the stones, cleared the moss path of twigs. The garden looked immaculate: not a blade of grass out of place.
The master inspected the garden quietly. Then, he reached up at a branch of a maple tree and shook it, watching the auburn leaves fall with haphazard grace on tidied earth. There it was now, the magic of imperfection.”
If pressed to explain this magic, I would say – it lies in freeing us from the illusion of perfection, an illusion that drives and damages. And better than any other art, gardening delivers the magic of imperfection. No gardener works long under the illusion of perfection. Design, plant, mulch. Then edge, weed, prune. Then observe, rejoice, take pride. Then turn your back, then turn again – and gone. The Scotch pine has grown, the edges are sloppy; the top knot of the Viburnum has shot out at a weird angle, the lilacs are tangled; the new plantings no longer keep pace with the old, the proportions are wrong. The garden disillusions us quickly but often with such delightful results. Random maple leaves on raked gravel appeals. That angled branch on ‘Snowflake’ charms.
Francis Bacon once described gardening as “the greater perfection,” distinguishing it from the lesser perfection of architecture which is the work of human hands alone. Gardening, we work with forces beyond our knowledge and control, and we come to realize that the greater perfection is the one we cannot see. And so, relaxed within our limits, we keep on pruning and revising.
To begin again. Yesterday I went out to weed the small oval garden that sits at the end of the back lawn in front of the row of blue spruce that marks the boundary line between my garden and my neighbor’s. Several hours later I finished because — no surprise — once there I realized it needed a re-design. I uprooted and tossed the overgrown Spirea, thinned and re-routed the Echinacea, and ripped out all but one of the daylilies. I moved the dwarf golden-rod to a more prominent position, thieved the necessary third Liatris from another garden, and trimmed the Abelia into shape. Collecting my tools and heading up to the house, I heard myself say, “It’s perfect.”
Thanks so much for reading my newsletter. If you are enjoying it, consider sharing it with one other person you think might enjoy reading it as well. I’d be grateful if you would help me reach more readers.If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader.
You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net.