Lessons from a neglected garden

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I haven't tended my garden this year. Spring came and went and because it was always raining, I didn't prune or weed or mulch. Summer followed spring, and the rain stopped, but still I didn't go in search of my gardening gloves.

A few weeks ago, only because we were having house guests, I grabbed my favorite spade, my trusty hoe, and some well-worn clippers and went to work hacking away at overgrown bushes and at a weed/vine tenacious thing that every year tries to strangle whatever else is in bloom. I yanked and pulled and raked for about four hours, dumped about 10 wheelbarrow loads of debris in the backyard behind the fence, and then called it a day. A very short day. And that's been it.

I haven't bought flowers for the planters, or coreopsis for the window boxes, or clematis, which I love and can never resist, or the standard two carloads of impatiens for my front yard, which take a whole day to plant and a whole lot of watering every day to keep alive. I have, instead, just sat and watched nature do her thing.

And it has been amazing.

I used to fantasize about writing a book called ``Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From My Garden.'' I even kept a notebook for a while, recording epiphanies I'd have while splitting daylilies, things like: ``It matters where you're planted.'' ``Maturity counts.'' ``Flowers, like people, grow at their own pace and bloom on their own schedule.'' Nothing original, I know, which is why I abandoned the idea.

But now comes this year and a revelation I didn't expect, a lesson I learned from my garden while sitting comfortably inside.

In years past, I was always outside, in the dirt, digging, planting, fertilizing, cajoling and fretting. I bought gardening tools (Ace Hardware's pull saw is my favorite), gardening gloves (Atlas - the original made in Malaysia), coyote urine (gross) to keep rabbits away from the tulips, deer repellent to keep deer away from the morning glory (it doesn't work), and dried blood - horrible smelling disgusting stuff - to keep rabbits, deer, and groundhogs away from all these things. That doesn't work, either. The animals remained, but the human beings who wandered into my yard? They couldn't escape fast enough.

I also spent hours every year choosing the just-right flowers. Dahlias, for example. I planted them in the spring, dug them up in the fall, wrapped them in paper bags, stored them in the cellar, and recorded all this in my gardening journal. Yet, despite these efforts, my garden wasn't ever perfect. The dahlias wouldn't bloom. The rabbits ate the tulips. The groundhogs ate the clematis. I'd lop off the shoots of things (think hydrangea) that seemed dead but were very much alive. Or I'd forget to water something and kill what I'd labored to grow.

Now comes this year, and what do you know? With no attention from me, my garden is beautiful. The tulips bloomed. Dozens of them. Maybe the rabbits ate some, but because I wasn't counting every day, I didn't notice what was gone. I saw, instead, all that remained. My moonlight broom bloomed, too, a shrub that is pretty and yellow and wispy, which I usually overprune and wreck. The rhododendrons, the peonies, the daylilies, the loosestrife, the rosa rugosa, the Shasta daisies. They have all survived without me.

Best of all are the hydrangeas. In years past, they have been stunted, pale, beige things. Now they are as blue as Smurfettes (this never happened when I poked nails into the soil) and there are hundreds of them, not just a straggly few. My garden doesn't need me to bloom. This is what I've learned. What I do is cosmetic. What the universe does, all by itself, season after season, year after year?

This is the real surprise.