DIY Gardener

The summer of 1982, my neighbor Adele reached over her backyard fence and handed me a freshly dug perennial from her lovely garden. In passing me that tiny bit of her garden, she inspired me to create my own garden. I have been a do-it-yourself gardener ever since. Like my gardening inspiration and mentor Adele, I use traditional tools like cultivator hoes, trowels, and other hand tools, rather than power this ‘n thats to get the job done. My idea of a rototiller is to go in the house and ask my hubby to come outside and dig for me. He can dig in a matter of minutes what it would take me days to dig.

Likewise, most of the other members of my “gardening staff” all call me “Grandma.” Other than occasionally paying a grandchild to help pull weeds or pick up seed pods from our locust tree, or a friend who is temporarily out of work, I have never hired anyone to help me in the garden.

Okay, I will admit to a tiny twinge of jealousy as I see landscaping trucks in the neighborhood. It sure would be nice to hire a professional landscape artist to draw up a plan for that Pinterest-inspired garden space I have been dreaming about – complete with the cozy two-story structure with a little sitting room beneath and a cozy bunkhouse above which would provide a grandkid-friendly (and fun) summer sleep space. It would be so cool to have a landscaping crew, each with more muscles than Wayne and I combined, jump out of those trucks and in a matter of days transform my garden space into the luscious dream garden I have in my head.

Oh, I have loads of ideas!

As nice as it would be to have a professional landscape team doing all the grunt-work, I must admit there is a special joy and satisfaction when I look at God’s wonderful artistry in our gardens robed in summer’s splendor and realize that “we did this” ourselves.

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
~ Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate 1986