Some people view gardening as a constant battle against Mother Nature. Magazine articles are titled “The War Against Weeds” or “How to Beat Bad Bugs.” Many of the pleasant activities associated with gardening are called “chores.” Hours of effort and work are put into making plants do what they really want to do anyway: grow and reproduce themselves.
I sometimes wonder what my garden would look like if I wasn’t able to plant or care for it one year. Certainly I would still have tomatoes, watermelon, mustard, cosmos, cleome, marigold, zinnias, nasturtiums, dill, borage, parsley, chamomile, calendula, arugula and sunflowers. These plants have all reseeded themselves in the past, usually in places they are not welcome. Sometimes I let them be, and they often do better and produce earlier than the seeds I plant carefully in proper rows.
On my daily walk one morning last spring, I noticed the strangest thing. Three years before, the power company had cut several big limbs off a majestic sugar maple. One day last May, I spotted several small branches growing out of the part that had been cut off. But these branches were blooming with beautiful white flowers definitely not found on a maple. Upon closer inspection, I found that the branches belonged to a good-sized dogwood shrub that had planted itself in the crotch of the maple tree. Surely not ideal conditions for growing any shrub, but that dogwood really wanted to grow.
Last year Wisconsin had much less precipitation than usual. Many plants respond to drought stress by producing more seeds. They want to ensure that their species doesn’t die out and they do everything they can to carry on. My maple trees produced about twice as many samaras (helicopters) as usual. My Siberian pea shrubs spit out seeds like there was no tomorrow and thousands of them germinated in the wood chip mulch that surrounds them. There were many more olives on my Russian olive and the arborvitae and other evergreens were so covered with brown cones that from a distance they looked dead.
If you devote hours to babying your plants along, or spend sleepless nights worrying that your yard or garden isn’t up to par with the rest of the neighborhood, maybe it’s time to back off, relax your standards a bit and just let your plants do what they want to do: grow.
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