summer garden of love

I’m a summer gardener. The area around our lake cottage is lush from storms and thick humidity. It’s the opposite of arid Southern California, where we live the rest of the year.  In Michigan, I rarely need to water anything but my window boxes dressed in their annual color.  As a matter of fact, the growth is so persistent at the lake that vines left unattended would and have completely grown over the house.

By the front steps I have decided to plant perennials.  I do things a little backwards.  Most people begin the season weeding and mulching their flower beds.  I try to do my mulching at the end of summer, figuratively “tucking my plants in” for the winter before I leave.  My friend Thanne taught me to put newspaper down before I mulch. Swaddled around the plants, the paper is more effective at keeping the weeds from growing than the landscape fabric that they sell at the hardware store, and over time it is biodegradable. This year she told me that cardboard works even better; and that’s good, because in the era of Amazon deliveries, the boxes proliferate faster than the weeds! 

In focusing on perennials, I hope to do the hard work now and eventually to leave to my children gardens that need little maintenance, unless they WANT to spend their summers digging in the dirt, rather than at the beach or on the golf course.  Perennials are a labor of long-term love, one that my kids may not ever recognize or appreciate. 

So many of our “acts of love” fail to impress the very ones we seek to bless.  But we keep at it, tilling the soil, pulling the weeds of reproach, laying the blanket of love, covering a multitude of sins and misunderstandings.  And we pray that once we’ve gone, the good will grow, and we’ll be remembered fondly as the ones who planted a summer garden of love.

Love, Liz