I opened my gardens for the Garden Conservancy Open Days garden tour this weekend. In the weeks leading up to the garden tour, it was hard to enjoy my garden. Mostly because I couldn’t freely harvest food nor flowers, in order to make sure every plant was in prime condition.
It was also hard to relax. Instead of admiring the way the Lady’s Mantle spread across the front border, rubbing shoulders with Johnson’s Blue Cranesbill and dramatic Alliums popping up in between, I was on my hands and knees plucking weeds, stooping to edge the beds and mow the lawn.
Like having house guests, it is always good to freshen everything with a clean sweep, and take on a new perspective to see what others see. The garden shed was organized and repainted, a map was made of the garden to update my own plant identification, and extra plants were purchased to fill in the gaps and give it a bit more color.
I visit many gardens on the Conservancy Tours, and last weekend toured several in New Hampshire. All the gardens were spectacular yet my favorite were those with less finely tuned maintenance. I marveled at the way volunteer foxgloves reseeded (shown above) in the Hayward gardens, and the runaway poppies bloomed in the Elliot’s wild garden.
Most of my best ideas come from other gardeners, and this time I returned home with permission to let go of trying so hard. It’s important to allow a little wildness to creep in; let the seed heads remain for the birds, establish an understory for smaller creatures to find shade; tidy only the plants that are thugs, leaving others to make connections.
Yesterday, despite the rain, I found that visitors to my garden were not there to judge if the garden was weeded, edged or mowed. Instead, they took photos of the twisted branches in front of the garden shed, the tapestry of colorful lettuces (planted too tightly) in the kitchen garden and the twig archway that led down marble steps.
A few even took time to sit on the chairs under the apple tree. I can only hope that visitors to my garden were inspired to relax a bit, find new ways to add whimsy in their own gardens and accept that all gardens are here to nurture our wild spirit.
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