dating a rogue

my grandparents' huge kitchen garden ignited a love for personal, as well as public, gardening. my own turn with gardening was dictated by where i lived until i had my own dirt. in los angeles, it was love from afar and in someone else's space. in brooklyn, it was by windowsill and backporch, coupled with multiple daily visits to prospect park and weekly visits to the brooklyn botanical garden. in new hampshire, it was the caretaking of existing borders of raspberries and rhubarb, but with my very own kitchen garden plot to nurture.

as a gardener who tends an overall live-in landscape design, it has taken me fourteen years to learn how to control that design. why, i don't know.

it wasn't until we bought our first home in texas that i had the luxury of designing living spaces within nature and the confines of our propertyline. to me, gardening likens itself to dating a rogue. you can bring it water and fertilizer and play nice, but you are not in control of it at all. maybe, at the onslaught of my first garden i rolled over and bared my stomach and hoped it wouldn't gouge me, but rather love me if i just kept wagging my tail. the submissiveness of being a gardener psyched me into thinking that i had no right to control at all.

this summer marks four years in this home. it was a clean slate to start with. i sketched in my head how i envisioned it and picked up a shovel. the past month has found me cleaning up the beds and tucking some plants back into their place. i had found myself walking around roses or errant bougainvilleas instead of showing them their places. anklebiters were bitten back and boundaries were reset. the garden is now easier to live with and definitely more the marrying type.