Split personality

I think I am a split personality.

The ordered and wise Linn helps beginner gardeners by answering questions and telling people how to arrange their gardens to be easy to maintain (the most usual wish of them all), interesting all year round and in what order things ought to be done for best result.

The spontaneous, slightly chaotic Linn looks at her own garden and feels like screaming - HELP! Life continues to go on without giving me the extra hours needed to arrange the garden properly. To be honest, I doubt that I really would arrange the garden properly even if I got 30 hours a day instead of 24. I probably just would find a thousand more projects to dive into. Every new idea has to be tried on. A variety of new plats need to be tested and new holes have to be dug.

And I believe that it’s there somewhere the key to understanding lies. The people I help with gardening advise usually want a nice garden to surround the house they live in. When we bought our home I bought a garden and luckily there was a house in it too. Both ways of looking at the garden are perfectly all right. They just are very different.

I live with my garden, follow it and am constantly being fascinated by it. For me, gardening is a process. When I weed and find a plant I do not recognize I have to let it grow just to see what it is. The birds planted three sunflowers by my rhododendrons a few years ago. It looked kind of funny with the three tall flowers above the low rhododendrons, azaleas and lilies. But I just couldn’t take them away. They grew so fast and I was curious just to see how tall they would become. And I have a passionate relationship with my compost. The process never ceases to amaze me. Cut grass, scraps of food, twigs etc goes in and out comes the best, darkest and richest soil there is. It even smells good. Amazing!
Oh, and I speak to worms to. I apologize when I dig them up. It is probably a good thing that we live in the countryside with very few neighbors.

With this relationship to everything living I do not think it is possible to get a well-ordered garden that looks like cut from a gardening magazine. And if it is possible, please don’t tell me. Let me live with this assumption through the grey days of November. In January I’ll start to make new plans again. By then I am ready to listen to advise.