There was a time, early on in my plant obsession, when I believed that gardening had an endgame. That someday, when I had achieved my idealized vision, I would stop, step back, take a deep breath, and say "done." and while I am still motivated by, well, now what is admittedly a much less idealized vision, I realize that it will forever be a moving target that is just beyond the mind's horizon. Gardening, in many ways, is (borrowing a line from William Cullina) "sowing the seeds of your own immortality." For at some point, all garden's will lose their gardner... and then what? To garden blindly, is to run in place as fast as you can go and then be surprised when you haven't gotten anywhere. You blink and suddenly you arrive at the end of a pointless race spent weeding, planting, deadheading, and fertilizing and come to the sad realization that you have accomplished next to nothing, and when you no longer have the capacity or resources to fuss and primp your work disintegrates before your eyes.
The "and then what moment" luckily happened early on (relatively) for me, around my early middle school years when I was going through a bit of a miniature rose phase.... yes, I know, tasteless, but I embrace it as part of my evolution as a plant geek. It was mid spring and I had just set my miniature rose de jour out in the garden.'Stars 'n' Stripes', with flowers that looked like they were plucked right from that scene in Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen's guards were sloppily painting the roses (although that might have just been in the Disney version, I never did read the book); white with bright red streaks, about as gaudy and unnatural looking as one would hope a flower to be.
Rosa x 'Stars N' Stripes' - Stars N' Stripes Miniature Rose
This little guy is more of a pet than a plant so consider yourself warned.
Zone: 6-10
Purchase from: Heirloom Roses, David Austin Roses
After a week or two of being outside in a humid New England summer, the ill-fated rose promptly contracted blackspot, and dropped nearly 90% of it's leaves. I, being the nurturer that I am, gently dug him up, potted him, and begun a daily spray application of some home made baking soda concoction that was suppose to help with the black spot. It did help, and eventually new leaves took the place of the ones that were lost, and in a week or two, my baby was back to his full and bushy self. At this point I started to lay off the spraying.... and in a few days the blackspot immediately came back. I went through a few months of this... I'd coddle the rose back to a respectable state, stop coddling, the blackspot would come back, and I'd go back to coddling. By the time September rolled around and I was on the fourth or fifth cycle of blackspot I took a good hard look at the sad sickly little rose, with a few blooms teetering out on the end of bare stems, and just thought "WHY?" Why does it make sense to grow such a plant? One that, as soon as you put it out in the garden, not only does it not thrive, but needs constant intervention to simply survive. Needless to say, at the end of September I put the good ol' Stars N' Stripes' out of its misery, and it was laid to rest in the good ol' compost pile.
The older I've gotten the less and less tolerance I've had for coddling, as I've come to realize that establishing diverse and self sufficient plant communities takes time, especially when these communities include species that have life cycles that operate over decades and sometimes even centuries. My goals as a gardener have moved beyond the mere superficial display of ostentatious blooms, evenly clipped hedges and well manicured lawns that will cease to exist as soon as I leave the garden to its own devices. It is my hope that with careful research and planning I can engage and enhance the diversity of endemic natural communities around my home, and re-establish persistent and resilient plant populations that contribute to the richness and dynamism of these interwoven relationships. And while I may fail at my lofty and nebulous ambitions, it is my hope that the populations I help to re-establish will, rather than being a symbol of my own mortality, be the closest thing to immortality I can achieve, lasting through the generations, weaving and embedding themselves into the place I call home. So when no one is around who remembers me, and my name is forgotten, my memory will continue to quietly grow and thrive along side the plants I grew so many years before.
