L.I.M.P.

I wrote a few weeks ago about visiting a couple of beautiful gardens and having a dawning sense that what I do isn’t gardening, although it was not clear to me why not or what it is that I am doing all those hours outside the house with plants if it’s not gardening. Finally, I have concluded that I am a practitioner of what might be called Low Impact Management of Parks (LIMP). My job, as I am beginning to understand it, is to allow the outdoors to ‘find’ itself; to develop in such ways as it wants to develop; to protect it from problems that it might not fully understand; to help it to shape itself into a form that it will be pleased to have achieved. I am writing this, and I am seeing that this is the way that I continue to raise children when the children have gone off to raise themselves. I am now raising the outdoors.

And yet, and yet. It is a useful way for me to understand what it is I am doing and whether I am doing what I ought to be and how to account for decisions that seem otherwise inexplicable to me. For example, I introduce new plants into the outdoors periodically but make no particular effort to ensure that they have the best opportunity to grow well. In part, this is because I am not there half the time and so it’s hard to believe, for example, that making sure something gets the ‘right’ amount of water the first half of the month matters if, during the second half of the month, the plant is going to be on its own. Might as well be on its own right from the start. If the outdoors wants this plant, it will take it to its bosom, so to speak. And in fact, it does do just that with some things (creeping jenny, rose campion, foxglove, columbine, lupine, forsythia, candytuft, pieris, and spirea are excellent examples); others, not so much. The outdoor park here has twice rejected Japanese maple trees; it scorns peonies; it considered penstemon but after three seasons tossed it to the winds. My thought is that if I want a plant to grow and the park does not claim it as its own, it’s time to put it in a pot and bring it close to the porch where I and not the world will care for it. It becomes more like a pet.

Clearly, this does not lead to a ‘garden,’ or at least not a green and floral space that has been considered and designed and, in some significant way, controlled. Like those kids of mine who keep coming to visit in the summers, it is doing its own thing, with my occasional advice and even warnings (it should not be allowed to want either Broom or Herb Robert or bindweed), but it’s its own creation. Live and let live.