When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.”
Horace Walpole, author
I cringe when I witness death and destruction. I hate to kill anything. But in the last few weeks, death had to occur, and I bid a sad good-bye to my flowers, before I erected them from the ground and tossed them to the curb. My trudge down the street with my arms full of the long stems of cosmos was like a funeral procession to Chopin’s “Funeral March.”
Don’t misunderstand me. I get it. They are—after all the cold weather sets in and freezes them, and end of season nutrients disappear—officially dead or at least, on their last stem. My zinnias and marigolds were brown, crusty, and begging me to put them out of their embarrassing existence on the front lawn. So, I pulled them, and cut, and hacked, until my yard was nearly bare. They have no chance, I remind myself, because they are annuals, meant to grace us with their beauty temporarily until I plant seeds again. The perennials close their eyes in dormancy, and fade on their own.
And there you have it. My least favorite but necessary part of gardening: the end-of-season cleanup.
It isn’t just the loss of growth and beauty, the songs of the bees grown silent, the butterflies’ graceful flittering invisible, the hummingbirds greedily sucking the nectar from the flowers and feeders now vanished, or the disappearance of the goldfinches that once pulled at the seeds, but it is the impending aftermath I loathe: the cold. The brown and grey lawns. The short, sunny days. And in some years, the snow (and growing up in New England means I am DONE with snow).
What gets me through these months of slow, cold, dreariness? Ordering seeds.
Yup. And each year I learn what works—zinnias, marigolds, calendula, and sun patiens love my yard—and what doesn’t—the nasturtiums went crazy and wrapped their vines around our house like we were in “Little Shop of Horrors”—and I develop ideas of what to do different—shorter cosmos, if they exist.
I love creating, adding color, choosing flowers, and designing my landscape. My imagination has lately been designing next year’s yard so it’ll be more even, a bit shorter, and not so much flora that the plants crowd each other. Okay, so I shouldn’t have planted as many seeds as I did, but it was another experiment, and the neighbors did love the variety of color.
Gardening, for some reason, always reminds me of writing. I love the creating—shaping the arc, the theme, the characters, the experimentation; the writing; and typing “the end.”
The watering and nurturing happen when I edit and reshape that first draft into something readable and likable. The trimming, cutting, and killing of scenes, characters, and lines hurt the most.
In the end, it’s the pitching and letting go—though necessary—that creates an emptiness; otherwise, the manuscript sits and turns brown and crusty. And as we all know, that is not attractive. But once it’s done and off to hopefully spread its wings, I can begin creating something new.
And that is just as refreshing as a spring garden.
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