October 3, 2016 - Remember the importance of "now" in the garden cycle.
I kept an article
about the 1913, Sir William Osler’s address to students at Yale University. [1]
“Live neither in the
past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb all your interests,
energy, and enthusiasm. The best
preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.”
So,
this is one of the essays on “time well spent in the garden” – or the theories
of time and taking advantage of the “NOW” so that in the future there is
something exquisite that can’t be bought or taken from you. It is the investment of valuable TIME in the
garden and the results of same. I feel
it is the underlying reason why gardeners spend such concentrated effort in
their garden. Our gardens are our masterpieces, or another way of saying it, feast for our eyes and food for our
souls.
I
often hear from new gardeners that come to visit – OH, I just love your flowers.
Where did you buy them?” It
is always so incredibly sad that I have to dampen their gardening enthusiasm
with “they have to be planted in the fall or you don’t get them in the
spring.” Always their shoulders drop or
their smiles evaporate. It is not a
secret in gardening – if you are a real gardener. It is simply a fact. There is
a time for everything, a season for everything, and in the garden nothing is truer
than the time for what needs to be done in the garden in the fall.
So,
I am out in the garden today for as many hours as I can manage getting as many
of my newly purchased fall bulbs in the ground.
This essay will go on hold for several hours
– and I will give you an update of my efforts.
Update:
Some gardening is a
circuitous journey;
A route or journey
longer than the most direct way.
That is how my gardening efforts went today.
The location of where I wanted to plant my bulbs needed way more preparation attention.
I spent the day on some of the preparation part, and sadly, after really
assessing the situation, I will have more preparation tomorrow.
I
know I have three days to play in the dirt. I have expended many hours in the
dirt today not in the planting of the spring bulbs, but all to a good end. My white caladiums near the drive had died back
naturally and it is cool and the soil in the pots is not soggy wet which makes
the perfect time to un-pot the bulbs and put them on a rack to dry.
The
red caladiums in pots along the back area of where I intend to have this new
“spring bulb” garden needed to be taken up as well, and I put them on the
drying rack. With the process of starting on the caladiums, I continued on to
their fall cleanup. I moved to another section of the garden where I took up
the three flower boxes of red caladiums and put them on the rack to dry. I have only two pots of white caladiums left
to do and their leaves are still looking ‘ever-so-fine’ and they will be next week
or the week after.
At
this point my dear husband brought me a snack – [illegal per the diet doctor] -
Eskimo ice cream bar. It made a perfect
snack for a garden break.
I
was tired, but not done gardening, as I was now in the “sit down mode”.
I assessed the work
needed for the spring bulb planting and weighed that very arduous work against the
three pots of Blue Angel Hostas that looked a little ragged. The Blue Angels had taken off well this
spring, but then they sort of pooped out midway in the summer way before the
drought. They should have been divided
last year, and probably just ran out of nutrients in the large pots. They now
looked sad and ragged.
So,
my choice was easy. Save the nice big Blue Angel Hostas, a much needed project
and save the digging of the poor showing of the Elephant Ear bulbs until
tomorrow. I work best with a fresh cup of coffee at hand in the early morning
listening to the “bird talk”. A fresh start in the morning on any gardening
project makes for a better outcome.
When
I pulled the hostas out of the display area I noticed that my simple turning
them every few weeks did not do the trick this year at keeping the surface tree roots out
of them. I had to tug them up as tree
roots had found their way up through the center drainage holes in the bottom of
the pots due to the drought we had for several weeks. That was why they looked so sad.
I
trimmed back their leaves and proceeded to knock them out of their large pots –
one by one. Every one of my Blue Angel
Hostas had that nasty surface tree root up the middle and it had a full
stranglehold on my hosta roots. I pulled
the roots apart. You can easily tell the
difference between the white hosta roots and the orange tinged greedy tree
roots.
I
had fresh soil on hand, found additional pots and cut the hosta roots into two
or three depending on the size of the roots.
I proceeded to pot them up and water them in. They are lined up on the lawn, outside the
hosta bed. In the morning I will rake
the debris out of the bed and set them in place for the winter.
Again,
work that needed to be done, and satisfying work that will have great benefit
in the spring. The spring bulbs were on
hold until tomorrow.
The
quote from Sir William Osler at the opening of this essay was cited along with
another well-known quote by Arnold Bennett from his classic book, How to Live
on Twenty-four Hours a Day. [2]
“You wake up in the
morning and lo, your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours. It is yours. It is the most precious of
possessions. Its most effective use is
the matter of highest urgency.”
Before
I had gone out to garden today, I pulled a copy of this little book and quickly
skimmed it. The whole time I was out in the solitude of my garden I thought
about the suggestions and concepts outlined by Bennett.
I
suggest everyone visit [2] and read it.
Haven’t we all said at one time or another .
. . “when I have a little more time?”
I
challenge you to read it and see if you don’t acquire more out of life.
Life
needs to be lived in the “now”.
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