Gardening–The Naked Truth

My obituary will probably say, “He enjoyed gardening.” This will be a lie. “He enjoyed gardening” conjures a romantic image of me as smilingly strolling through tall waves of colorful, sweetly fragrant flowers, leisurely cutting the most magnificent blossoms and filling a beautiful, expensive vase with them, and then taking them into the house to my doting wife, who gratifyingly swoons.

But let us pull back the curtain of Hallmark-channel fantasy and stare at the brightly lit, naked, aging body of reality. The truth is I spend a lot of time like a minimum-wage yard boy—picking up fallen sticks and limbs, weeding, carrying heavy piles of weeds up steep hills, trimming, slinging, weed-whacking, and mowing, mowing, mowing. And occasionally I plant plants or transplant plants, or scatter some seeds on the ground.

The way I garden—lazily—there are at least as many failures as successes. You could possibly get the wrong idea about my skills when you see the flowers in my yard, but, like doctors, I bury my mistakes.

I once planted daffodils in a spot that turned out to be too shady because of a rapid-growing nearby butterfly bush, so the daffodils didn’t bloom. I dug them up and put in bleeding hearts, but that year the butterfly bush had died back, and the shade-loving bleeding hearts burned up. To this day my heart still bleeds.

When I garden, I wear a hat—and I don’t look good in hats. My head topper is a straw hat that I’ve sprayed about a thousand times with Deep Woods Off such that the straw is now drenched, discolored, and droopy. It droops so much in front that I can’t see straight ahead unless I tilt my head back about 45 degrees. But I still wear it, not only to protect my face and neck from sunburn but also to reduce the chance that insects will pester me to death. They did in fact once pester me to temporary blindness. A gnat had flown into my left eye, and as I was jogging back to the house to try to get it out, his wingman dive-bombed into my right eye. So I had to feel my way the rest of the distance—head tilted back, arms out, eyes stinging and squinted, legs slowly shuffling. I’m sure it looked like I was auditioning for The Walking Dead. Some people suffer from night blindness. I suffer from GNAT blindness.

Besides gnats, there’s an entire rogue’s gallery of other pests that constantly attack me when I’m in the great outdoors “gardening”: ants, bees, wasps, hornets, ticks, chiggers, spiders, and biting flies. I’ll spare you the entertaining details of all the bites and stings except to mention that once when a horsefly wouldn’t leave me alone, I began swinging my arms around, then took my hat off and swung that, trying to shoo him off. When I got back in the house, Carolyn said she had looked out and thought I must be doing “senior exercises.” She had just seen a video in which elderly frail people were encouraged to try slow, fluid motions of their arms in the air to help them maintain limb mobility in their dotage. Carolyn told me, “You’re doing really well, Bill,” and laughed.

For me the least enjoyable, least romantic thing about “gardening” is all the stickers, prickers, briars, and thorns that are a constant, literal pain. Every year in the midst of what I want to be a perfect spot of gorgeous blooms grow sticker briars that look like humongous blackberry bushes except they produce no fruit. My gardening joys also include hacking at multiflora thorny roses, spiny wineberry thickets, and thick sticker vines that climb 30 feet or more up into tall trees. I’ve been stuck so many times that I now carry bandaids and alcohol prep packs in my pockets. This saves me the time of running back to the house and also significantly reduces blood loss. Even though I wear padded leather gloves and long sleeves, and use long-handled pruners, thorns seek out openings at the juncture of my glove and sleeve. Each time I’m foolish enough to do battle, I end up with matching, blood-red bracelet tattoos. Sometimes, Nature is a big prick.

So, no, I don’t a hundred percent “enjoy” gardening, but I do take some comfort knowing that even for God, trying to maintain a perfect garden on earth didn’t work out all that great.

(My thanks to Wildacres Retreat, where this essay was written.)