I hate gardening. I’d rather be reading, or eating, or sleeping. I don’t like getting dirt under my fingernails, fertilizer up my allergic nose, and bugs in my underpants.

That’s probably why my garden is a failure. Well, failing to thrive anyway. It knows that I am avoiding it, lurking in a shadowy house while it does it’s level best to grow untended.

I tell myself that it’s the shade of the tall coastal oaks or the thick clay soil that dooms our plantings, but I know full well that the shining gardens of Sunset Magazine headquarters or Filoli Gardens are each less than five miles away.

I promise myself each time a visit the garden center to buy replacement plants that this time I will put in the effort they require and deserve.

I buy myself a new pair of gardening gloves to seal the deal. If I look like a gardener, I tell myself, maybe I’ll feel more like one.

I Want A-Mazing Results

You know, fat returns in the short term like a high performing business. However, I lack the will to dig in.

I just can’t find a way to embrace an activity that will test me in ways I have so long avoided. For gardening, I have to admit, will put me in direct competition with my mother and I know who will win.

That’s a bit unhealthy, I hear you say… more than a little judgmental and self-critical. You bet.  She’s really, really good at gardening. Both her thumbs are green and wherever she’s lived has bloomed in profusion. And for more than fifty years I’ve left her to it, unwilling to put myself out there on her turf, so to speak.

My husband, The Brit, has a more casual relationship with his little place in the sun. As respite from his days spent locked in airless conferences rooms and long international flights, he sits on his bench under the two hundred year old oak and sips a glass of “something a bit special” admiring his roses. I sit next to him and try to hold my tongue.

He sees glorious blossoms and verdant lusciousness. I see browning bushes, puny perennials, and hosts of “things left undone.” He enjoys a guiltless sunset and I make my penance for god-awful, lax and laughable gardening.

The Chaos of Creation

Making the world in seven days and all that is in it must have made a phenomenal mess.  Think about it, all of that sludge and slime and birth and decay. Yuck. But like Eve in her Garden, I want to enjoy the fruits.

Maybe the problem is that I have never found the peace and contentment that so many gardeners discover only on their knees in the earth. Perhaps I have been too proud to admit that I cannot control such a creation and I have resisted putting in my time and labor to see it bear fruit, figuratively and literally.

A great read for mid-life by Dominique Browning

Surrendering to Slow Love

Over the weekend I read a wonderful memoir, Slow Love by Dominique Browning, who also blogs at www.slowlovelife.com. In both she writes of her new incarnation as a free spirited writer living on the coast of Rhode Island who lives life slow. She is learning to love herself, her solitude and her environment. She has planted her new garden with echoes of all the gardens she has loved through the arc of her life. It has blueberry bushes from her father and rampant spearmint to scent her walks.

I want to this kind of garden too. I have the time, but not the inclination. I want results without the effort. I want to appear as if I care, when in my heart, I don’t. I want others, those women who walk their dogs down my street, the venerable volunteers of the “support the park” committee and even the “mow and blow” guys to admire my prowess with a trowel.

It’s time to face facts.  There’s simply no way to achieve this without slowly sweating in the sun and toiling in the soil.  I will have to break out my holey mom jeans, a tattered work shirt and a straw hat.  I will have to stink like manure, develop bad hat hair and shield my ragged cuticles from my guitar teacher.  And there is no guarantee of success. Plants don’t lie. You either care for them or they die.

My Place in the Sun

I am grateful to have a home to call my own and a plot of land to cultivate around it. I paid our outrageously high property taxes today and I’m grateful to be able to afford those too when so many people have had to forfeit their dreams of a safe haven to foreclosure and financial ruin.

I am full of shame and blame at my rampant neglect of my little piece of the world.

I can’t help myself… I feel I am a good mother but not an Earth Mother.

My thinking is entrenched and I want to “farm out” my gardening.

Can this pitiful plot be saved? Your encouragement and patient instruction are welcome.

Tags: baby boomer, blame, confidence, connection, failing to thrive, fingers, garden, non-judging awareness, noticing, peaceful, self-critical, shame