PURE POTENTIAL

“Give a woman an inch and she’ll take a mile.”

It’s an old adage and there’s probably some truth to it although I’m pretty sure you could substitute words like ‘kid’, ‘man’, ‘teenager’, or ‘dog’ for ‘woman’ and it would be just as true.  With the #metoo movement going full on these days it’s important to keep things non sexist.

On the other hand, if you were to say “Give a gardener a square foot and of dirt a single petunia and there will never be an end to their expansion plans.”  My husband is fully aware of this.  So was my dad, and his father-in-law before him, not to mention the two sons-in-law we have acquired.   The women in our family have this gardening bug bad.  Or maybe, I should say we have it good – wherever we go we manage to carve out a space and create our very own happy place.

More than it being a simple matter of just plunking seeds or bedding plants in the ground, what sets true gardeners apart from folks who fill flower beds that already exist is that we would never think of stopping at the status quo.  It would just make us twitch.

In fact, we could not be happier than when we’re offered a whole new space to play with: a wide open untouched space, an absolute blank slate.  To a non-gardener it might look like a plot of land – a reason to buy a bigger lawnmower.  To a gardener it is a canvas to fill with colour and texture and scent.  And we can’t wait to get started.

Non-gardeners tend to see obstacles, whereas gardeners picture a whole array of options when presented with the same bit of real estate.  Things like rocks and trees and slopes present unfulfilled features to be added to, augmented, and enhanced.  “They” see work.  “We” see pure potential.

My personal chunk of prairie has been a work in progress for the past 35 years.  Over time the original shelterbelt/windbreak has been bolstered with new rows of trees, the vegetable garden has occupied four different locations looking for ‘the perfect spot’, and while we’ve added on to the house twice, we’ve also added two man-made hills to give the house a prettier setting.   We’ve built an impressive rock garden into a slope and then moved all those huge rocks and installed them a new hillside a decade later because of the snow removal difficulties the first location caused.  Although seeing the first one destroyed nearly broke my heart, the new one is, as promised, bigger and better with even more rocks.  My on-going project is to clear the deadfall and broken branches out of the tree line – the part I’ve got done looks so nice, proof that I have to keep going.  Lately we have opened up a new area and planted everything from apples and cherries, asparagus and strawberries, saskatoons, currents and grapes.  If we live long enough we will enjoy an orchard too. 

It’s a lot of work.  I love every square inch of it.

This week I was given a great compliment and a new challenge.  A young neighbour has asked me to help her create a garden in her yard.  She, like I did, finds herself in a large farmyard with only a few remnants of a previous woman’s touch.  She, like I did, sees pure potential.  We are both excited to get started.