Love-Hate Relationship

I have a love-hate relationship with gardening in general and our backyard in particular. It’s not that I don’t like beautiful gardens, with rich carpets of color and texture. It’s just that, well, I’m lousy at it.

I don’t know the technical term, but I have the polar opposite of  a green thumb. In fact, my thumb is the Darth Vader of anything that grows. I can touch a plant at the nursery and it will shrivel and die.

My wife and I have a long history in backyards. When we were first married we lived in Juneau, Alaska, and our backyard was sand. I know that because I paid for it to be delivered, and I spread it by the shovel-full. Before that, it had been a swamp, minus the alligators.

When we moved from Alaska, we landed in Minnesota and had the mother of all yards —10 acres. We had a ginormous garden, fruit trees, a grove, hedges, a pasture and lawn, acres and acres of it.

If you’ve never been to Minnesota, you won’t believe this:  Anything grows there, and it grows fast.

When we first moved there, we were talking to a friend about his garden.

“You have to be careful,” he said. “Gardening is dangerous in Minnesota.”

“Oh,” my wife and I responded. “How so?”

“Well, you put a seed in the ground and dive out of the way so it doesn’t hit you when the plant explodes out of the ground.”

He wasn’t kidding. The topsoil is rich and black and 10 feet deep. It is called “blue earth.” We never fertilized. We never did anything other than try to keep the weeds at bay, which was a job in itself.

When we moved to Oregon to be closer to my wife’s folks, I thought we had reached to ultimate compromise. Oregon is heaven for gardening. It has the perfect climate and soils.

Unfortunately, the options for gardening are so plentiful that my wife and I would often get ourselves into a sort of vapor lock situation. She’d look at our backyard and envision one thing — an array of flowers here, bushes and trees there — and I’d look at the same yard and envision — work.

This, of course, would lead to further discussions. We’d go on long walks, discussing gardens and work and the need for compromise. Ultimately, we did reach an accommodation. That’s diplomatic talk for “she won.”

And I’m glad she did. If I was in charge, the backyard would probably be the same half-acre disaster area we had when we bought the place, complete with an old trailer, 30-foot-tall photinias that looked as though they had escaped from the set of a Tarzan movie, a fence that split the yard in half, another fence that was ready to fall over and lots of other things I really can’t go into.

By the time she was done, my wife — with help from me and multiple others — had transformed the backyard into a pretty darn nice place to be. It’s not the Oregon Garden, but there’s a little waterfall, some cool-looking trees and my favorites — blueberry bushes. (Being a practical sort, I like to eat what I grow.)

Most importantly, though, our gardening experiences have taught us about patience and the benefits of hard work, that, ultimately, will produce beauty where once there was only a thinly disguised junkyard.

And, oh yes, it’s also a reminder of the love Patti and I share, for our backyard and for each other.