Taming The Wayward Garden

The garden, sprightly, energetic in its
recovery from winter's bleak blanket,
promises much and enjoins eager gardeners
to patience. We never cease to be amazed
at its resilience, the garden's insouciant
shedding of ice and snow as it welcomes
spring's waxing warmth, the rejuvenated
heat of the sun and inevitable showers.

Tantalizing us with a display of graceful
shapes and colours in early spring bulbs,
and timidly tender leaves. By veritable leaps
and bounds sap runs upwards and trees leaf
outwards, birds return early to peck at haws
and berries of last summer's hawthorne and
crabapple. Soon enough they blossom and
early perennials hold aloft their showy blooms.

A swift succession of roses and honeysuckle,
clematis and then morning glories blaze
forth. And the garden settles into summer,
lavishly flourishing, introducing the stage to
a brilliant succession of ravishingly lovely
plants flowering robustly in their ideal
conditions of sun, rain, wind and glorious pride.

So sumptuously rapid the growth and the
pride that the gardener is soon overwhelmed
by a plethora of tending tasks requiring the
brutal creativity of an artist, the tender
ministrations of a butcher. As spent blooms
are snipped, runaway stalks and canes brought
to earth, and branch-burgeoning trees
and shrubs ruthlessly slashed and shaped.

The tasks pleasing and exhausting, the
results minimally affected, the garden
shrugs its philosophical acceptance of the
gardener's silly conceit and proceeds
anew its avid journey into joyful chaos.