Small Decisions, Big Payoff

Post 80

Spring is change as beginning. Spring's flowers, after winter's dinge, jolt us with pleasure -- colors, smells,warmth, a liveliness once lost, now regained.

Gardeners share this enchantment at least as much as others. Sunny days bring us outside to work, of course, but in a flush of blooming exuberance, also to buy. The lure of the nursery with its rows and rows of promise, the dreams of future beauty piled on beauty, make a harmless temptation easy to give in to. Most of us are suckers and buy and buy and buy. Why not?



Well -- if you are starting a garden, no problem. Especially if you keep buying through gardening's three seasons. However, many of us keep buying for spring, even after we have sufficient spring bloomers, but lag at buying into the year as the flush of newness lessens.   Undreamy facts such as weeds, humidity, bugs and plain habituation have a way of lessening our original unnatural exuberance. Meaning many gardens look great from April-June, maybe July, and then go kaput.



 So how to keep going? Well. it's pretty simple really. But it takes self-discipline, which, of course, I stink at. And so it has taken me ten years to do what I might have done in three. But boy, is it worth it.

It's all in the small decisions. Every time you want to buy a plant or spread some seed, ask yourself --  when it will bloom? If the answer is spring , make sure you love, love, love it. If the answer is summer, make sure you love love it. And for fall... just get the darn plant if you like it at all. Because you will wind up love, love, loving it.

Think of the garden as a racehorse, you want/need an extrafast sprint at the end. Channel Velvet Brown whispering into the Pie's ear right before the end of the National.

Because winter is coming. Even though my garden still has two perennials yet to bloom (mums and wolfsbane,) winter's time is right behind them. And how much better to go into it with all the joy of the full drama of autumnal abundance. That way the decay can be rich and strange, not rote and predictable, making the next transformation into spring all that much more magical.