Learning to Love Imperfection

I didn’t start out as a gardener.  My mother doesn’t have stories of me as a precocious three year old building my own compost pile or experimenting with mulch methods.  Nope, I was a pretty average kid.  My parents gardened and I benefited.  And when I was asked to participate in the potato digging or bean picking, I did what every other kid my age did.  I complained and faked sun stroke.  For many years I watched my parents battle gophers and deer and complain about water bills, and the thought often occurred to me that a grocery store might just be the answer they were searching for.

Then I grew up and headed straight for the city.  The Big City.  Several of them in fact.  After two years of asphalt and exhaust fumes, I began to yearn strangely for the taste of dirt and the smell of a homegrown tomato.  Or was it the other way around?  The city was starting to confuse me.  So I looked around for a little bit of garden to make my own.  At $600 a square foot in Manhattan, an indoor herb pot was all I could manage.  In London, I graduated to tasteful window boxes and containers on the doorstep.  But in Los Angeles I reclaimed a 2x15ft corner of my apartment’s parking pad and called it my Victory Garden.  There I grew tomatoes, carrots, chard and beans, and lovingly brushed the orange brake dust off my first harvest.  I was a gardener.  At last.

I didn’t know what I was doing.  I didn’t have friends that gardened.  Every one around me was far too busy abusing their 20-something bodies to care about fresh produce.    My tomato plants sustained numerous crushing injuries involving car tires, and my carrots were only two inches long due to the cement slab that ran under that part of the bed.  I would call my mother with questions only to hear the twenty-five year veteran of veg and vine say “Why on earth are you asking me?  I don’t know what I’m doing.”  It started to occur to me that this was a game with a constant learning curve.  Learn how to grow a tomato:  hornworms would be grateful for your effort.  Plant a perennial that had “very hardy” on the label:  expect the hardest winter since 1893.  Yet I kept trying.  I just wanted to grow things.

A few years later I approached my first large garden with the same enthusiasm.  Only this time experience had tempered it with trepidation.  I signed up for every garden speaker in the greater Maryland area.  One step forward.  I lost all of my apple trees to the evil machinations of the Black Walnut.  Three steps back.  I grew a perennial border worthy of Kew Gardens.  Four steps forward.  We went through two years of drought and half of it died.  Six steps back.  And yet, with every victory, with every failure (and there were many), my knowledge base grew – and so did my garden.

And that’s what I keep telling myself.

Half of gardening is experimentation.  This plant here.  That plant there.  This hammock here and pass the Sangria please.  And the other half?  Getting used to imperfection and embracing it.  (Actually there’s another big part that involves hard manual labor, but my percentages wouldn’t add up so we’ll just forget about that right now.)  Faced with a new bug, a new disease, a new fussy plant, every gardener feels frustrated and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what we still need to learn.  So don’t give up.  Let’s face it, it would be pretty boring if we knew it all.

And that’s what I keep telling myself.