I’m bad at gardening and honestly, I don’t like it much. Had I known how bad I would be at gardening, I’d have paid for landscaping when I moved into my home, the kind of landscaping you ignore — native plants, low water, hire a guy twice a year to mulch and maintain. My house has way too much front yard, which I shamefully neglect, and just enough back yard, which would do nicely thanks, if I didn’t have that stupid front yard, too.
I spend nearly all my free time in the backyard — when weather permits. There’s a hammock hanging between the posts the previous owner put in as a laundry line and a lawn that goes brown in summer and is gradually turning to dandelions and clover. I pull the dandelions, the clover I let spread.
There are three raised beds where I plant peas and lettuces and tomatoes every spring. I pay some attention to those plantings, but everything else — maybe I water. Sometimes. Maybe I do some clean up. Maybe not. And yet.
There is a sprawling mass of pink anemones that wave in the breeze, a random assortment of day lilies in bright orange and coral and pale yellow, comfrey that collapses under its own weight and has to be cut to the ground several times over the course of spring and summer, and two kinds of sage. I also have a lot of dahlias, or would, if they all came up every year, but I forget where they are and don’t dig them up to separate them. This year I buried a dozen new ones at random, a gift from some women I know on Vashon Island who have a spectacular dahlia garden. I also bought a handful at a garden show — a place I have no business being — probably the first time I’ve intentionally chosen a planting. Everything else has come to me via people digging up their own much more carefully managed yards and telling me to go straight home and put this in the ground, pronto.
I envy people who like gardening, who plan what goes where and worry about their soil and remember to water. Their gardens are things they have made rather than yards that just sort of happen. Because I’m so very bad at gardening, it surprises me when everything comes into flower. But bees and hummingbirds love the ramshackle mess of my yard; butterflies visit the peas and the echinacea. They seem content. When I’m swinging in the hammock watching a hummingbird study a spiky red and yellow dahlia, I’m content too.
If I had some money burning a hole in my pocket, I’d happily hire a landscaper to deal with the front yard.
But I’m not sure I’d change anything out back.