[Garden Memories - III]
Lawn and ivy: that’s what Mom used to landscape most of the perimeter of our ranch house.
Lawn is an obvious choice. With proper irrigation, it offers a weed free green space, a low maintenance ground cover in the winter, and a “heat dump” in the summer.
English ivy is a less obvious choice. Sure, it’s low maintenance in theory, but it’s generally used as a border in cooler climate gardens. Mom used it more like a taller lawn, covering thousands of square feet in the front and side yards. Our semi-arid California home was far from the temperate climate of England, which meant two things: it demanded years of irrigation and attention as it limped toward lush maturity, and it needed a lot of weeding support.
My brothers and I had weeding stations in the ivy. While Mom insisted the stations were proportionate to our age and ability, each of us complained at the daunting responsibility of suppressing the weeds until the ivy could take over. “As soon as the ivy gets established,” Mom would say, “You won’t have to weed anymore.”
Every week it seemed, usually on Saturday, Mom would send us to our weeding stations. “You’re almost finished” sounded less encouraging than mocking. The weeding seemed futile at best; at worst, it was a torturous curse for thinking we could contend with nature. With no end in sight—mostly due to the disparity in speed between weed an ivy growth—we’d begrudgingly kneel and pull, kneel and pull.
This went on for years. Indeed, it was a curse.
And then one spring our weeding stations ended. Never again did we weed the ivy, as it finally was thick enough to slow weed growth and seed germination.
Wisdom is often merely the vantage point of time. What we're blind to on the “front end,” Mom was keen to from the “back end.” She had the perspective of years, knowing that weeding now will result in no weeding later. As it is with weeding ivy, so it is with life in this way. Life is only lived going forward; it often feels futile, unproductive, and meaningless. But looking backwards, our investments make sense. Do they promote growth and sustainable futures? An answer requires wisdom and lived experience and age. It requires seeing the question from the “back end.” In other words, it requires elders to remind us that we’re not cursed; we’re merely investing in a better future that is emerging.
