balance and permanence
In the hustle and bustle of modern life nature feels slow somehow, we don’t have the patience to acknowledge its subtle cues anymore and in the process we don’t realize the fact that the fault lies with us and not with it.
There is a reason for nature’s slowness, the same reason that makes long lived creatures’ hearts beat slower, the rhythm of the tides monotonously even and the timing of the first bloom in spring eerily precise: systems that are inherently stable have no reason to change over long periods of time, and those systems include many species of the plant kingdom.
One can’t understand a garden’s idiosyncrasies, because it functions on complex parameters that are mostly hidden from view, especially when one regards the vegetal realm as a simple, static set that can be modified at will.
In reality an established perennial border is an autonomous system that manages its own nutrients and water, maintains its own hierarchy, finds its own balance.
In all my years of gardening I learned one thing: the garden picks and chooses what it will accept or reject and it always has the last word. You can expend enormous amounts of energy to make the wrong plant fit and exhaust yourself in the process, but at the beginning of the next season that plant will not be back, no matter how bold the font on its perennial label.
This is why every spring I wait with the trepidation of a final exam to see which of the new plants got booted off the island. Those that don’t usually thrive and grow beyond my wildest dreams.
After years of experience one reaches some level of wisdom; one stops worrying whether things will work out and starts knowing that they will. For instance, I don’t doubt the fact that next April the garden will be covered in violets.
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