You start out gardening young and optimistic, and happily toil many hours in the blazing open sun, tending every annual and perennial imaginable. One day things go fuzzy, and you awaken to find that your elderly neighbor saved your life by dragging you into the only shade for a mile around—a thin shaft cast by a telephone pole. But you’re young and resilient, and the next day you’re back outside.
After the fourth time you come-to under that pole, you head for the nursery and shop like a maniac for a shade tree! You planned to buy just one, but the enthusiasm that filled your yard with a thousand perennials means you come home with five trees. And then, of course, introduced to the wonders of woody plants, you routinely supplement those with more.
For a few years you enjoy ducking in and out of the shade as necessary, while still waist high in your tangle of floral exuberance. These are halcyon days, and only once or twice do you drift back to consciousness, your neighbor thanking you for the trees that mean he needn’t drag you as far as before.
But way sooner than you ever expected, what happens? Your sun lovers flower less and less. Gradually, they thin out, and then they die. You look around and notice—for the first time—that your yard is so thick with tall trees. This explains why all the local lumberjacks have been slowing to a leering crawl as they drive past. And above you? A canopy so dense that government satellites can no longer report your exact location to Proven Winners.
You miss your bright, busy, buzzing garden of yore. Worse, you’ve become compulsive about your hosta collection, and you seem damned to the constant spraying of deer repellants so foul that the smell never leaves your head. Day after day, spraying. And even sometimes at night! You suffer a recurring dream. Detached from your body, you follow your joyless, drifting, hollowed-out self as you perpetually dispense stink around your yard like some kind of heartbroken tomcat—a victim of unrequited love—sadly, endlessly, hopelessly marking his territory in vain.
I know some of you don’t share this same story, but that’s not the point. The point is that gardens change!
Ideally, we’d be born into this world with an old-soul wisdom that no one can explain. And, even better, we'd begin gardening young and with a vision so rare and deep that every decision we make and everything we plant just works out. Inevitably, the garden would achieve its glorious, triumphant climax of beauty just as we arrive at our golden years.
But if, for some reason, that doesn’t happen, here’s what you should do. If you need shade, plant a tree. If you need sun, cut one down.
