Dear Martha,
You have been an inspiration to me and I want to thank you for the marriage counseling. At the very least I learned a lot about myself. This knowledge has also led to the realization that working on your property will not end up satisfying either of us.
As you know is going to I’ve been going through a lot of changes lately and I’ve come to the point where I no longer want to compromise my gardening ideals. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want to support bad landscaping decisions
which is going to be hard because it seems the world is full of them. You may be saying “where does this guy get off saying what’s good or bad” and it’s true most of my gardening knowledge has not come from formal training but hands on experience yet that experience has taught me how to recognize many of the classic mistakes you are now making.
I’m going to point out a few and although you may not appreciate them now perhaps later they can help.
1. Impatience (and you’re stubborn too!)
I know you say you’re an old lady and you don’t have time wait for trees to grow but when you’re
In the middle of building a new house on the property, landscaping now is a waste of time and money. First of all, construction workers don’t care about plants. They happily kill plants because
Those plants are just another thing in the way of completing their job. They don’t think about the
Future of the landscape or how long it takes a plant to grow, they only think about what they are
Getting paid to do. That’s all. That includes ripping out irrigation if it’s in the way. So any land-
Scaping during a building projects will only result in lots of destruction and turmoil in the garden.
Contractors are also often the “shoot first ask questions later types”, so you never know what’s going to go down during the project. This leads to predicaments like when you insisted on planting an orchard against my recommendation
and sure enough the workers damaged the irrigation which killed some of the trees and then they all had to be moved to make way for a mountain of excavated dirt. I know this sounds bitter and I don’t just want to say “I told you so”.
I want to share what gardening has taught me and how the lessons can be applied to the rest of the human experience.
I imagine people who work inside, in offices, who work with the symbols of language and are used to attaining their
goals via scheduling tasks on the calendar don’t realize that timing can be critical in the landscape and that timing
is influenced by the seasons and the weather. It’s kind of like the stock market. Buy or sell at the wrong time and
you can lose a lot of $$$. (Next post- Don’ be no oppressa’ man)
