The less you control, the better it feels

It’s easy to get anxious about our landscaping.

Imagine pulling up at the cottage on a Friday night. You’ve driven three hours and the traffic was terrible. Now here you are, ready to sit on the dock with just the loons for company.

But you glance at the lawn and notice it’s getting pretty long. And those hydrangeas left over from last year – they’re looking terrible after the snow flattened them. And then there’s that weedy area by the driveway that never got settled after you had more gravel added.

Pictures and reality

None of this is how you pictured your cottage. You wanted it to look neat and tidy, with flowers and fat hosta leaves. But the reality isn’t matching the vision.

And that’s where the anxiety lies.

That’s particularly true when you’re working with plants because nature has a habit of doing what it wants to do. Grow, mostly. Or get eaten by deer.

And so we trim and we mow, we fix what’s wrong – what doesn’t fit the picture in our heads.
But then the land does what the land does and breaks out of the frame in our minds. So we fix it again.
You can see where this is going. The anxiety isn’t from what the plants are doing – they’re just being plants – but because the landscape isn’t conforming to the picture in our heads.

Dialling in

I know this feeling. I’ve experienced it at Lucas House, my trial and demonstration garden in Haliburton village.

The side nearest the post office is a strange beast. It’s partly shaded by the building but in the middle of the summer, the afternoons get hot and sunny.

Part of it is dry because a row of cedars suck up the water. The other part is wet, from downspouts or from the never-quite-drying shade cast by the house. All this makes it hard to choose the right plants – a foot the wrong way and you’ve got the wrong plant in the wrong place.

I tried planting violets near the cedars, but it was too dry and they died. But I’ve discovered the shaded area right by the house is perfect for Bottlebrush Grass.

And then there’s the deer, which I’ve written about before, who are either napping there or dining there.
I can have the most beautiful vision for this part of the garden in my head, but it doesn’t survive the first touch of reality.

Have I got anxious about this? I’d be lying if I said no. But I’ve come to see the process as a gradual dialling in to what the land wants.

There are plants that are flourishing there – drifts of Pearly Everlasting, a clump of Swamp Milkweed, sedges. These are plants the land supports.

I have some shrubs that are happy there, when they’re not being eaten. I’ll be protecting them this year.

Caring with curiosity

Do I care about this? Yes. I’m not caring less just because it’s a struggle to make vision and reality meet. Instead, I’m caring differently, with curiosity.

I’m practising a different kind of control, where I’m noticing, then acting based on what I see. There’s something relaxed about this, like a Friday night should be. I’m working with reality instead of imposing reality.

I’m gardening on the shaded side of Lucas House. There’s a feeling of transition there; a sense that it’s not woodland and not open land. I can see the scattered shrubs of a forest edge amid a carpet of sedges and Pearly Everlasting.