Scrooge: The Gardener Version

December 20th, 2016

I was dozing on the La-Z-Boy with the season’s first seed catalog when this old guy in chains wakes me up.

I was leafing through seed catalogs when all of a sudden…

Before me is a scraggly, bearded fellow with compost-stained hands and what looks like worm castings on his boots.

“I am the Ghost of Gardens Past,” he says. “Behold!”

Suddenly, I’m looking at me in my first garden.

It’s a puny thing (the garden, not me).

It’s barely 10-foot square and laid out in little blocks, just like Mel Bartholomew instructed in his “Square-Foot Gardening” book.

The plants look like the “before” picture in a Miracle-Gro ad.

The soil is the consistency of brown Play-Doh.

I watch as twentysomething George proudly harvests the week’s bounty: a lollipop-sized head of broccoli, four pea pods and a radish.

A Victory Garden it is not. It’s barely an Embarrassing Defeat Garden.

Yet the smile on my face says there’s some kind of perverse satisfaction taking place.

“So what do you make of that?” asks Ghost Past.

“That I should’ve taken up handball instead?” I reply.

“Yeah,” says Ghost, “but also that in gardening, as in life, we grow from our shortcomings. We get wiser by taking stock of our mistakes and imperfections. And most of all, it’s the process that matters just as much as the results. Maybe more so.”

“Hmmm, you’re onto something there, O Soiled One,” I murmur as I doze off again.

Next thing I know, I awake to a lady’s voice and a visage suspiciously similar to Martha Stewart.

“Hey, are you…”

“No, I’m not,” she interrupts. “I get that all the time. It’s probably the white gloves and the hydrangea-accented halo. I’m the Ghost of Gardens Present. Look here. You know what this is?”

I look up and see a panorama of my 2016 gardens.

The scene is light years ahead of the puny veggie square.

Verdant beds are neatly edged and gracefully curving.

Specimen plants are placed with focal-point precision.

Even Martha herself would nod approvingly at the color and texture pairings.

“Pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you?” observes Ghost Present.

“Well, it IS a big improvement over that one-radish harvest,” I point out.

“But what’s that I see over there?” she asks.

I turn to see what used to be a block of cabbage, now decapitated by a groundhog despite a brick-reinforced fence, a Havahart trap and two kinds of pest repellents.

“Seems to me you’re not even as smart as that woodchuck,” Ghost says.

I hang my head in shame as Ghost Girl points to the grub-killed patches in my lawn, the tomatoes rotting from blight, and the astilbe with fried leaves because I didn’t have time to water.

“So what did you learn?” asks Ghost Present.

“That I still should’ve taken up handball?”

“Maybe,” she answers, “but more importantly, that things will go wrong no matter how much you know or how smart you think you are. That’s OK. Remember, it’s the process. Wasn’t it still fun? Didn’t you appreciate the beauty of the plants that didn’t die or the ones that didn’t get groundhogged? Didn’t you flourish in the fresh air, revel in the warmth of the September breeze and even enjoy that day when you got soggy wet trying to get the mulching done in a steady rain?”

“You’re right, Your Hydrangeassness,” I reply. “You win a few, you lose a few. Either way, it’s a good thing.”

“Hey, that’s MY line!”

I doze off again, only to be awakened by an angelic figure with a long-stem red rose in one hand (no black spot or Japanese beetle damage either) and a gleaming new pair of Felco No. 8 pruners in the other.

“Let me guess,” I say. “You’re the Ghost of Gardens Future.”

“No,” she says. “I’m just a garden-variety angel. But take a look at this.”

She shows me a DVD of gardens that make Longwood look like a back-alley weed patch.

Every plant is lush and perfect, nestled all snug in their beds.

Not a lace bug is stirring, not even a vole.

And everything is blooming at the same time.

“So this is what my gardens are going to look like in the future?” I ask.

“Are you kidding?” says the angel. “Your place is going to turn into a bindweed-infested jumble as you get older and fogey-er and can’t even bend over far enough to reach a 4-foot dandelion. What you’re looking at is a computer-generated dream garden.”

“That’s a lousy trick,” I say.

“No trick,” she says. “Just tell me what you learned.”

“To focus more on the process and less on the results?”

“Now you’re catching on!” says my pruner-toting angel. “See, there is no such thing as a perfect garden. There’s not even such a thing as a DONE garden. That’s the joy. That’s the secret. It doesn’t matter how your garden stacks up to anyone else’s. If you like it and had fun doing it, it’s just right.

“Gardening is about the trying and the creating, and yes, realizing what a tiny but interconnected blip you are on God’s green Earth,” Garden Angel continued. “Few things teach hope and optimism more than getting down and dirty in a garden.

“No matter how many blights, late frosts, marauding birds and droughts ruin your tomato crop, aren’t you absolutely positive next year’s crop will be the best ever? And isn’t that a good way to view life?”

“Angel, you’re right,” I say. “I can’t wait for spring. But since you’re so wise, can’t you help me do something about that stinkin’ groundhog?”