Marriage is such a balance of
compromises, you love your partner and want to keep them happy, but still find a way to totally be yourself. Gardening is a balance of trying to achieve your dreams, and batting away reality when it comes too close. Who other then gardener will have the patience to plant a seed and expect it to flourish into a beautiful plant. My little condo garden in White Rock Working with a non gardener who just happens to be the muscle behind the dream is like giving directions to a tightrope walker who is blindfolded, listening to Mozart through ear buds. It doesn’t always work.
My condo garden in White Rock, is not the same climate as up here. My husband and I stand in our backyard, it’s barren to me only apparently, faceless, brown, ranked by towering fir trees. To him, it’s open, spacious. The yard slopes back down towards the chain-link fence, that serves no purpose other then to titillate Boots into thinking the grass is greener out past it’s boundaries. We stop, plan, draw on the grass, and dream different dreams. Apparently all of the beautiful gardening photos I’ve been pinning on Pinterest all winter, and carefully showing him have not had the desired effect of inspiring him to believe that this isn’t a lot of work.
Many of these trees, and plants I grew from tiny little 4 inch pots. He’s rightfully worried that I am taking on too much, and I know that I am… but I need to be able to look out the window and see something green and growing, like veggies in beds, when he thinks we should just go to the farmers markets.
Granted it was a smaller space, and we had more abundant water. He doesn’t want the back yard cluttered, while I envision raised beds, gravel pathways, outlined gardens with hand poured stepping stone paths meandering through arbours, raspberry patches, and water features. He sees mosquito havens, and rocks being flung by lawn movers into expensive glass windows. I see blooms, he sees bust… he’s the muscle, I am the muddy boot dreamer. Never the twain shall meet? We shall see if we can meet in the middle, and both of us be happy.
