Lessons from a Charlie Brown Garden

This is not a Charlie Brown Garden.  This picture is from Annie's hibiscus, surprise lilies (more on those in a moment) and cleome bed.  Lovely isn't it?

This is a Charlie Brown garden.  This discouraging patch of weeds greets me every time I walk outside.  What you see is a failed dream.   A dream of a lovely vegetable garden that might look like Charlie's

lovely, order, neat as a pin, square edges and not a weed in sight. Sigh.

Or like Annie's lovely vegetable garden

packed full of nutritious and beautiful vegetables.  Isn't this curly kale the most lovely shade of green-blue?

Here's what I've been harvesting since I put in these tiny little raised beds--weeds!  Wheelbarrows full of weeds, over and over again--weeds.

Every year at this time I'd tell myself like Charlie Brown "wait until next year".  Winter I'd make new plans and resolutions to become a better person, a more diligent and persistent gardener, the kind of person who can grow beautiful, healthy vegetables for her family in neat tidy gardens.  As the weather warmed each spring, I'd give myself a pep talk.  "This is GOING to be the year!  Yes sir, no worries, I've got my garden all laid out on graph paper and it's going to be a thing of beauty."

Nothing says hope and potential like a formerly weedy bed, cleared of all weeds. And nothing says failure like a defeated gardener facing a weed pile.

I have great excuses for my failures.

There are distractions of all sorts.

Bob with tacos, Prince Charming with beer and Linda

Summer picnics

Music festivals

Sheep herding competitions (bet you didn't see that coming!)

Pool parties

Yes, summer is full of all kinds of distractions which keep me out of the my teeny, tiny, in theory oh-so-managable vegetable garden.

A few weeks ago Linda and Charlie were over for dinner and walk around our gardens.  Charlie, always the diplomat, didn't comment on my weedy vegetable patch, like the true friend he is and with his best southern manners and charming drawl, he said, "Felecia, you are a new American gardner."

I love flowers, drifts and drifts of flowers.  Wild, exultant flowers climbing all over each other. It took me a couple of weeks of savoring Charlie's compliment to acknowledge that while I might be a New American Gardener, I most assuredly wasn't a vegetable kind of gardener. 

Instead of that Charlie Brown garden being a reminder of all my failures, it could become a new blank slate for more flowers.  I've always wanted a cutting garden.  This little spot has all of the right features.  It's just outside the back door, it's small, it's behind other bushes so the public doesn't have to watch the ugly part of the cutting garden when it's getting started or I've harvested everything.

And so I tackled the weeding of this garden with new resolve and energy. 

"To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom"--Socrates

As I began to accept that I'm not a vegetable gardener, other unflattering truths were easier to accept. I'm also not the kind of gardener who can get annuals to sprout from seed.  Never, ever, under any circumstances.  Kind of a bummer because most of the flowers I want to grow  in my new cutting garden are annuals, prolific, all summer bloomers, that one generally only starts from seed.

Why is self knowledge, which seems so easy, so hard?  I wake up morning after morning with myself.  Why am I such a mystery; especially to myself?  Charlie can see what kind of gardner I am, a different kind of gardner than he is.  But still one worthy of respect.

Since I'm so late getting this garden started there were no plants at the garden store.  But they did have this new tape.  See the seeds neatly positioned in the tape? And very clear and explicit instructions on how to plant.

Just lay the tape down, toss a little dirt on it.

Wait seven days and voila!  Zinnia plants. You can't see it, but they have the tiniest little buds.

It's a small start towards redemption.  You can also see that I heavily mulched these new beds and the areas around them.  No reason not to give myself a jump on the weeds.

This is what redemption and grace look like.  

If we don't learn to love ourselves as we are, can we ever learn to love others with all of their quirks and ticks?  Once we acknowledge our own human-ness with all of our frailties and short-comings, can we extend a little grace to ourselves? Can we lay that mulch on good and thick so that we don't have a weed field in our souls 10-minutes after  we finished the last weeding?  Can we offer ourselves some forgiveness?  Can I forgive myself for thinking and trying over several years to be a vegetable kind of gardener?  In that forgiveness, can we find the ability to love who we truly are?

One more word on those surprise lilies, or what Annie calls "naked ladies"

They are called "naked" and "surprise" because there's no foliage at the base of the flower.  The flower stalk comes up naked, or surprises the gardener without a hint that it was there.  Actually there is foliage.  The foliage comes up in early spring dying back as summer progresses. The lilies spring up naked in late summer.

Wishing you love, compassion and peace in the next week Wonder Ones!