Overgrown and overblown

I have never had anything remotely resembling a green thumb. I like plants, but the feeling is not mutual. People don’t believe me and send me orchids or succulents. “They’re so easy!”

Have you ever slowly, helplessly, watched something shrivel and die? This is not an experience you want to gift someone.

One of the supposed perks of the house we rent is that it came with a gardener. By all appearances, Hugo is an affable guy. He’s quick to smile and wears a headband year round, as if he plans to attend a 1980’s workout session as soon as he’s done with our yard. You can only admire someone who’s thinking about fitness after his attempts to tame an urban jungle.

He has only ever wielded three tools of the trade: a lawn mower, an electric trimmer, and a leaf blower. Our neighbor, who employs a fancy landscaping company, calls gardeners like ours a “blow and go.” But that really undermines what Hugo is capable of with a trimmer.

We used to have several odd-looking bushes that reminded me of coral or seaweed once they got to a certain size. They had wavy, lacy stems and were covered in pink flowers in the winter. Our landlord must have told Hugo the plants should never be allowed to resemble underwater creatures. With regularity, Hugo would cover the plants with a cloth that had a small circle cut out of it, then trim off anything that dared to grow above the circle, ultimately resulting in the death of all but one of them.

When he pulled their stiff, brown skeletons out of the ground, it left an odd hole in what is otherwise a mosh pit of vegetation. A heavily perfumed, purple-flowered plant slumps in the corner, no longer able to support the weight of its own limbs. The oleander battles it out with the birds of paradise for space, like two brothers punching each another in the arm in the backseat of a car. A tree, whose top has been shaped into a perfect but very lopsided oval, leans so far to one side, the leaves almost touch the ground when it’s heavy with rain.

Our garden is an overgrown mess, but I have neither the expertise nor the courage to do anything else with it. Apparently Hugo feels the same.

The surprise is when friends or neighbors come over and exclaim how lovely the garden is. For a long time I just assumed everyone was lying, but one of my daughter’s friends took a picture, saying “Someday I want a garden just like this.” Teenagers are not always the most reliable, but they certainly don’t lie about their garden fantasies.

It has forced me to consider that where I see chaos, others see wild beauty. Where I see a Pinterest fail, others see an impressionist canvas swirled with dark and light green, along with speckles of purple, orange, yellow, and red.

Not everyone is expecting to live alongside the gardens of Versailles. It makes me wonder where else in my life I’ve been torturing myself with overblown expectations. My garden has its own ideas about what it’s meant to become and my job, my only job, is to be patient enough to let it emerge.

Emergence isn’t so easy of course. I’m reminded how Vincent Van Gogh earnestly threw himself from one career into another. He went from art dealer to boarding school tutor to bookstore clerk to preacher. He failed at everything he tried, but not for lack of trying.

It was clearly frustrating. He wrote to his brother, “I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There’s something within me, so what is it!”

The advice he got back from his family was to think smaller, simpler: carpenter, baker, librarian, barber.

It was only in exasperation he turned to drawing and painting. Even then, he wasn’t good at it. He simply couldn’t recreate figures and landscapes before him. He enrolled in art school, then dropped out a few weeks later. His former boss at the art dealership informed him, “Of one thing I am sure, you are no artist. You started too late.” His breakthrough came while trying to paint on a sand dune during a storm. The conditions forced him to let go of his goal of a realistic rendition.

It’s clear whoever picked these plants had no idea how big they’d ultimately become. But isn’t that like all of us, underestimating our potential for growth? Thinking who we are today is the person we’ll always be? Believing people when they tell us it's too late to do something different or better?

You could spend your life trying to trim your expectations to fit into the acceptable circle that society offers you. Or you can wait and just see what blooms.

I look out on my garden now and think: It’s a little weird, and certainly not what I planned. But you know what? I like it.