It's Like a Jungle Sometimes

“It’s like a jungle sometimes. Makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” Grandmaster Flash had it right in the eighties. Every time I look out our French doors at our garden, it’s the refrain that runs through my head.

People who like boats might move closer to water. Avid skiers, closer to mountains. So based on our choice of home, you might think we are passionate master gardeners. Only you’d be wrong, and we’re not. We bought our house in December when its tiered gardens and glorious flowerbeds were shielded by a blanket of snow. We knew about them, of course. It had been a much-touted selling point. But perhaps we didn’t realize exactly how much we were biting off until the profligate spring growth left me feeling as impotent as a brush whacker on a Deep South chain gang.

I emailed the former owners to see if they had any words of advice or plans of attack. “Don’t worry,” they wrote, “It is overwhelming in the spring, but it’ll slow down.” The plus point was that someone had had the vision, or the cash-flow, to have all the flowerbeds painstakingly landscaped, perennials planted to ensure wave after wave of perpetual colour. After the spring daffodils, crocuses and tulips came the azaleas, then the bleeding hearts. An enormous swollen red stump became a huge rhubarb plant and tall stems wearing tier upon tier of grass skirts turned out to be deeply blazing Asiatic lilies.

The grass was another matter. American grass is different than any I’ve known, thicker, more determined, and always in need of a trim like some sort of mop-headed petulant teenager or a shag rug. And to be fair, our predecessors had been pretty gung-ho about lopping down trees and pushing back the woods, so thanks to them there’s a lot of lawn to mow. My husband saddles up in the zero-turn mower, offers a resigned wave, and steers into the horizon, a lone cowboy preparing to mow for three point five hours straight.

I caved and called a landscaping company for advice. Exactly how far out of our depth were we really? For starters, we didn’t actually know our plants from our weeds which accounts for why I was happily letting some crazy weeds grow three feet high waiting pointlessly for them to burst into bloom. The plants were providing a sort of slow-motion entertainment, mystery creatures rising from the ground. My husband urged me to weed out invasive grasses busting out of the fast-growing ground cover in beds around the house. But I waited and was rewarded when they turned out to be regal purple irises with bright yellow tongues. So they weren’t growing in an aesthetically ideal spot, but they’d worked hard to get there and who was I to yank them out? Meanwhile, we weren’t quite sure what to do with the flowers that had run their course and I lived in fear of decimating the gardens with the same aplomb with which I had unwittingly emptied the perennial beds at our old home.

The landscaper summed up our predicament. “Well,” she said, “Let me put it this way. What you have here is pretty spectacular. Someone really did his homework. But maintaining this could be one person’s full-time job.” I wasn’t surprised. In my ongoing correspondence with the former owners I had since learned that their in-laws, keen gardeners, lived with them and took responsibility for the bulk of the gardening. Oh, to be retired with a gardening habit rather than a harried mother of two, burning the midnight oil and occasionally running out of bread.

The landscaper agreed to my demands. They’d teach me what to do and I’d hire a co-weeder for two hours a week in the peak summer months to get things under control. I was working on the premise that information is more powerful than fear, and with due diligence - and a little help - I’d eventually tame the beast. Except then we went away. For two weeks. And while we enjoyed some Massachusetts sunshine, New York drank its own weight in rain. We returned to a jungle. The grass a foot high, some weeds reaching four feet. Grass cuttings sprouting in the flower-beds and the patio was awash with green.

I rolled up my sleeves, and started with the patio. I made the mistake of lamenting the wilderness encroachment to a friend, apparently an unsympathetic one, who told me to buckle down and get on with it. “Susie,” she said, “You might not have what you want, but if you try you might find have what you need.” And I suppose, with her clichéd nod to the Stones, she has a point. A rolling stone gathers no moss and it’s best to make hay while the sun shines. I’m already on it.