LANDSCAPING PROJECT
CULTIVATES SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Journal of Healing – June 11, 2003
By Mary Koch

There's something brutally instructive about watching a professional correct a job that you've botched up.

It could be a computer you tried to program, a sink you tried to plumb, a room you tried to decorate or, as in my case, a yard I mis-scaped.

Last week I watched professional gardener Donna Newell and her crew in one day rip out many years' worth of my gardening mistakes. It taught me a little something about gardening and a whole lot more about myself.

I'm treading on dangerous ground here. Writers love to use gardening as a metaphor for life's lessons. It's a cliche. But, hey. Cliches embrace common truths, or they wouldn't be cliches. So bear with me. I've learned something worth cultivating.

* * *

FOR NINE YEARS, ever since my husband's stroke, I've had specific gardening goals. As the primary caretaker of John as well as our house and garden, I needed things simple. I wanted a low-maintenance, low-cost, low water-use yard.

The vision in my head was something else again. In my mind I saw a Northwest cottage garden: a cross between Thomas Kinkade and "Sunset" magazine. My vision and my goals were not, you might say, "in synch" with each other.

I endlessly visited nurseries, purchased plants, stuck 'em in the ground, failed to tend them and then wondered why I was not achieving either my vision or my goals. The result was, as one friend gently described it, a yard "out of control."

Getting the yard under control was a whole lot like undergoing psychotherapy. It forced me to be excruciatingly honest with myself.

I began by listing my goals, prioritized and in writing for all to see. There would be no fudging, no backing away from them.

Step two was letting go. I had to say goodbye to everything that contradicted my goals. That was the brutal part.

The sod was cut loose in long strips, rolled up and happily toted away by a young man who's just starting a yard. I could have warned him what he was in for, but he wouldn't have listened. He's got years ahead to learn from his own mistakes.

The plants that were ripped out had been monuments to bad decision making. But I loved them. Now I will learn to love them in other people's gardens.

* * *

OUR YARD was stripped, naked and vulnerable. Then the bare earth was covered with vast pieces of fabric weed barrier, resembling black fence-to-fence carpeting. Next came gravel. Mountains of gravel. I fought off despair. What had I done?

Only my faith in Donna's skill kept my voice cheerful as I attempted to explain the plan to incredulous neighbors.

Sure enough, destruction generates rebirth. Healthy new plants arrived on the back of Donna's trailer. Undemanding plants. Plants that will get their automatically regulated doses of water and live happily ever after. At least that's the plan.

To keep myself away from the project (away from rescuing plants from the discard pile), I organized my thoroughly cluttered office, even reconciling the checkbook. I marveled that my days were free of anxiety and guilt – anxiety over things that needed to be done and guilt because I wasn't doing them.