New Learning

Despite advanced age, there is yet much to learn about one’s self and one’s life. For example, I take it as a given that gardening is essentially a solitary activity. When I first began gardening, during WWII in our Victory Garden, my father would assign each of his three (then) children his/her own individual plant areas to tend to. Mostly we were responsible for weeding, but occasionally we would be required to do the dreaded ‘thinning’ (how hard is it, 65 years later even, to pull up something that has grown solely at one’s request and with one’s tending?), and eventually the glorious harvesting. But weeding was probably 80% of the time commitment.

I imagine he did this to keep us away from one another and prevent our constant bickering. But, when you are a kid, you don’t really realize how irritating kids' bickering is, of course. So I thought he was just teaching me the nature of gardening, if I thought anything at all.

In the decades since then, I have almost always been a solitary gardener. There were a few years when my older daughter, a life-long, devoted gardener could have shared the experience with me, but I was busy with other things and was just happy to turn over gardening, for the most part, to her. So she mastered the art of solitary gardening. My son didn’t take to gardening much until he was an adult and many states away from me, and my younger daughter never much took to gardening. And the husbands…not gardening types.

So how surprised was I yesterday to find that gardening is NOT a solitary activity? The Garden Club requested residents’ help in digging out blackberries and horsetail from the beautiful main street ‘beds’ that they have built and planted. They are not exactly beds; more like the berms in roads as they are raised up from the dirt, but not surrounded by anything that would make them raised beds other than the piled up dirt and mulch itself. They are filled right now with wilting daffodil leaves, California poppies, the remains of croci leaves, a smattering of cosmos seedlings, and an ample supply of the offending invaders.

There are about 20 of these planted berms, each maybe 6-feet long, and I expected we would each be assigned to one of them and to do our work and leave. When we got there, there wasn’t anybody to assign our work to us, so Ed started in on one and I started in on the one next to him. A few minutes later, other people arrived and one of them set to work with him and one set to work with me.

I suspected that telling the newcomer to go work in his own berm wasn’t the way to work in the Garden Club’s ‘community flower beds,’ but it is surely what I felt like doing. He gave me some instructions on the best way to proceed (Did I ask for any instructions about how to weed a flower bed?), whacked away for awhile with a large shovel (while I used a narrow trowel and a dandelion digger in order to provide the least disturbance to the adjoining plants), and then moved on to a berm with a larger group of social gardeners. I finished off the berm, worked on a couple of others alone, and went home when it was all pretty much finished.

So, you can learn several things in a day: Gardening can be a social activity, and I am even more of a hermit than I thought. Also, horsetail like blackberry appears to be a tenacious plant. I suspect we'll be cleaning it out for several years at a minimum. And maybe I'll learn to talk while gardening.