Deep Roots: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Garden

If you garden long enough, you run out of garden. Planned and unplanned plant purchases can really eat up some ground, and whether your garden is large or small, sooner or later, it gets used up.

And it’s not like the garden centers make it any easier to pace yourself. Besides serving up endless offerings of better and better, they lie to you. Yes, they lie. If the tag says a perennial will spread 12 inches, it will spread 24. Any shrub said to grow three to four feet will grow six to eight. Six to eight means ten to twelve. Ten to twelve means you might as well park a bus in your yard. In a way, plants are like spouses: they just keep getting bigger. 

And, of course, there are all the accoutrements too. Fountains, benches, gazing balls, gnomes, whirligigs. You don’t think they will take up space, but they do.

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But it’s the new plants that claim the most real estate.  Never has there been a gardener who planted their garden with plants they would be forever content with, at just the right number, in the exact space they would need, and then just let them be for the rest of their lives. Nope. Not one gardener. Not once. Ever.

Instead, this is what gardeners do. They plant their garden until it is full. Then they expand the garden. Which they then plant until it is again full. Eventually, the entire yard is garden. And full. And that is when the fun really begins, because no gardener ever just stops buying plants. No. No gardener has ever done that. Because it’s impossible.

A gardener at this state of their gardening life shows up at the garden center not to buy plants, mind you, but just to look. But because they looked, they saw. And what they saw were plants they had to have. (Usually many of them.)

Once home, it is likely the plants sit for a while in a discreet holding area, or maybe in the driveway, until one day, the gardener goes to plant one of them.

And with a shovel in one hand and the plant in the other, they jauntily stride into the garden, looking for a place to plant it. And they look. And they look. The stride becomes a walk. The walk becomes a trudge, and the trudge settles into aimless drifting. The gardener squints hard, looking for any sliver of open ground. Finding none, they come to accept that some other plant will have to be sacrificed so this one can be planted, but choosing is hard. So hard. Hours go by. The neighbors become concerned as they watch the gardener aimlessly amble around and around. A plant in one hand, a shovel in the other.

Abruptly, the gardener’s concentration is broken by the sound of sirens, and immediately they find themselves trying—and mostly failing—to prove to a paramedic that they haven’t had a stroke.