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Guilt Grows In The Garden

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By MONICA BRANDIES | The Brandon News

Published: April 23, 2007

Shame and guilt grow in gardens and threaten to crowd out the joy of the beauty and sense of accomplishment that also grow there.

Rooting out those feelings is a job for the mind and heart, not the back, still a bit difficult but well worth the effort.

When I had my first garden open house in fall 2000, one woman remarked, "I always thought everything had to be perfect, and now I know it doesn't."

I took that as a compliment, for it is one of the most important lessons I hope this column will get across.

My first rule for gardening is that it should be enjoyable. No garden is ever perfect. And when mine is most shameful, great beauty and many other benefits can still be found there. Bad as mine sometimes looks, I can pick flowers, fruit and vegetables there almost every day of the year.

I got an e-mail asking if I was having a spring garden open house.

I never do and the following are just some of the reasons why.

Even if we don't have any frost, bananas look bad through the winter. Most years I have enough frost to make them look worse. Once I worked up the nerve to ask a frequent spring visitor, a garden writer from the north, what she really thought of my garden. She admitted she had been shocked by the ugly banana plants at first, but complimented me on my great diversity.

During the frost season, it pays to leave those ugly dead banana leaves right where they hang because they provide some protection from the next frost. Now that frost danger is well past, you can cut off the dead leaves and move them to the compost pile. But wear old clothes to do this. Banana juice stains. But homegrown bananas taste so good I would not do without them.

Now we are in our driest months and watering is the crucial issue. People often ask me if it is better to grow in pots or in the ground. That depends. For me, in the ground is better because I sometimes forget to water containers often enough. In-ground plants may fail to thrive if they get too much neglect, but they are much less likely to die. On the other hand, if you take proper care, they can sometimes do better in containers.

Spring is the best time to gather leaves and that window is fast closing. My garden has been strewn with bags of leaves for weeks and I am happy to have them. I have been spreading them as mulch as fast as I can. I have lately been situating some of the bags where I hope to kill the weedy vegetation for better plants in the future. This is also a good way to store some bags for later use in out-of-the-ways places.

Because the winter was so warm at first, there was much more growth and overgrowth this year than usual. My paths are closing in and I promise to widen them considerably before fall. But in the meantime, I will quote Laurie Walker, head of the University of South Florida Botanical Gardens, who was speaking of her mother Joan's garden. "Her house floats on a sea of nasturtiums all through every winter."

So does mine, though perhaps only such a trained gardener's mind would see it that way. This is the attitude we all should cultivate.

Vines are always a problem in my garden, though I love some of them dearly and others in limited amounts. I was about to separate the Louis Philippe rose from the black-eyed Susan vine until my husband, David, said one morning as we backed out of the drive, "I like that combination of colors."
I don't really, but that might be because I know the vine is a weed. I left it for now.

It didn't take me any time at all to take photos of several glaring examples of need for improvement in my garden. It is never perfect and I claim valid excuses like frost in the winter, drought in the spring, too much heat and rain in the summer. Even after I clean all that up for the fall visitors, it still won't be perfect, though as close as I can get it. But even at its worst there is always much more there that makes me both happy and healthy than ashamed.

Refuse to let the guilt out grow the joy. Gardens don't have to be perfect.

Monica Brandies can be reached at monica@gardensflorida.com.

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