Is Time in Your Garden a Journey or a Destination?
By Laura Huenneke
For many people, their gardening efforts focus on outcomes. How soon can I harvest tomatoes, and how many will I get? Are my squash large and beautiful enough for the County Fair? Does my yard match the landscape of my dreams? But gardening is also a process, with long lead times and lots of work before any harvest comes in. Which part of gardening brings you the greatest satisfaction – the product or the work that leads up to it?
For my first few years growing plants in Flagstaff, the process was the point. The time I spent in yard or garden was a respite from work and day-to-day worries. I certainly was not getting many results to be proud of! The landscape was not very pleasant to look at, and the vegetable garden yielded little to eat. I didn’t even learn that much from my experiences. But the time I spent outdoors, with hands and eyes attending to something other than my “day job,” was extremely valuable.
After a few years, though, I became more interested in outcomes. There are many tools to help a gardener become more effective. For me, the single most important step was thinking about the calendar. You can’t harvest corn or winter squash in August and September if you didn’t plant them in early June! Adapting planting calendars to the typical last frost in my own location was a big advance.
Mapping and planning the garden beds, rotating planting locations, and keeping track each year of the varieties planted and dates of planting and of harvests – all those organizational steps lead to much improved outcomes. Taking the Master Gardener course offered by Coconino County’s Cooperative Extension office tipped the balance for me, helping me take seriously the actual successful production of greens and vegetables.
I still bounce between process and outcome in my rural yard. In a landscape, the “product” could be an arrangement of plants that comes close to matching what you see in your mind’s eye. It might also be the hoped-for experiences you have in that setting – whether watching birds and other wildlife, entertaining in a beautiful patio, or just relaxing in a tranquil hammock.
However, my yard efforts don’t always achieve those outcomes! I spend a lot of time puttering and working out there – weeding, trying to nurture different native plants – but until the last couple of years only the wildlife watching has somewhat met expectations. I’m finally becoming clearer in my thinking about what I want to see from our windows or from the deck, planning, and then spending effort on planting or maintaining to match that view.
A journey can actually be incorporated physically into your landscape. Pathways are essential components of garden design and can be planned into even very small spaces. Japanese gardens, for example, are often designed to draw visitors along a twisting path to discover new vistas.
Landscape gardening as an active, ongoing process may be exactly what one desires. I attended an online webinar about yard and garden design earlier this year. An interesting point made by the presenters was that some people enjoy the process of hands-on maintenance – pruning, trimming, or replacing annuals – and would be bored by a static yard. Other people do not want constant labor; they can and should choose designs and plant materials that are more static and less maintenance-intensive.
My own family displays this contrast in attitudes. My sister, in a northern state, purchases scores (sometimes hundreds!) of tulip bulbs each year. She loves the process of designing a spring display and planting the beds each fall. My approach has been to skip tulips (the deer like them too much). Instead, I choose daffodils, which survive gophers and grazers to flower year after year, requiring little maintenance except an annual feeding of bone meal.
Your “finish line” in gardening can be anything from regular meals cooked with your own produce, to a peaceful corner of the yard for relaxing or watching birds. My pleasure in the gardening journey has been enhanced by paying more attention to the final destination. But most of us can benefit from reminding ourselves to take pleasure in the process as well as the final product of our outdoor labors.
Laura Huenneke is a plant ecologist, a certified Master Gardener, and the coordinator of the Gardening Etcetera column. Gardening Etcetera is written for the community by certified Master Gardeners of the University of Arizona's Coconino County Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program. Have a gardening question? Visit our Online Plant Help Desk at https://extension.arizona.edu/programs/coconino-county-master-gardener.
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