Every spring, I prune and prod and weed and water.  I spray my roses to ward of thrips. I do my best to fight grubs and move plants around to fill areas out.  I spend a lot of time plucking new maple seedlings from the ground and fertilizing, fertilizing, and fertilizing with worm poop and Neptune’s Harvest (though eek – just realized Neptune’s Harvest is fish-derived, so I guess I may need to find a new one).  Very time consuming, but oh how I love looking at the fruits of my hard labor every year.

This year, mother nature realized that I just had bigger priorities, so she helped me out.

Everything simply exploded this year. I am not talking about vegetables or annuals, but rather my perennials.  Bit by bit, I’ve accumulated lovely plants.  Many came from my childhood home in Upstate New York.  Rather than leave their beloved perennials when moving, my parents potted them up and I drove back to Boston one April day with a small SUV LOADED with our family’s favorite plants.  Roses, clematis, indigo, forsythia, gooseneck loostrife, a snowball bush, a lilac, and more. Add the others I have planted, such as creeping flox, hollyhocks, iris, broom, asiatic lillies, purple balloon flower, and oh so many others, and I now have a mature garden.  That first year they slept.  The next year they crept.  This year, oh how they have sprawled!  While I was inside in chilly spring weather with my newborn, everything decided to become just what I hoped it eventually would.  I’m nearly out of room now and I’ll have to start pruning! Though, I can always find more room…

I was standing out front planting my dahlia bulbs one day, and a woman yelled to me from the street to tell me how pretty our garden was.  I stopped working, stood back, looked hard, and realized…wow.  It is.  It was hard work, but I love how it ended up.  Some of the plants knew better than I just where they should sprawl and spread to, and I thank them for it.  It suits my personality because they are well-kept and established, yet unorganized and a bit chaotic (in a good way).

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