“We should be done some day, right?” my husband asks about the edging. He’s been edging my garden beds for 20 years – not continuously, but maybe it feels that way.
Weekend walkers stop to admire our gardens and ask; “What’s that plant?” His reply: “I don’t know, I just do the low-skilled stuff, like edging and hauling mulch. My wife had the vision and knows the names of all the plants. Just wait, she comes out every three minutes to check on my work.”
Even though he’s a plant illiterate, as a trained artist and painter, he’s my color consultant. He has his own vocabulary. “Put a tall plant in alizarin crimson behind that low cadmium yellow one,” he says. A quick visit to his painting studio and a survey of the paint tubes unravels his meaning.
When we bought this place, I could have held a seminar on invasive plants. The three-quarter-acre parcel was covered with Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese knotweed and stiltgrass. The rest was green, not with grass, but a little grass mixed mostly with weeds. Every weekend my patient husband heard these words, “I’ve another idea for a new perennial bed. Grab your edger and let’s bust some sod.”
We began with 10 yards of composted cow manure from a local farm and I set about amending the soil. There wasn’t an earthworm in sight. My husband hauled hundreds of wheelbarrows of manure up our hilly property. He’s a longtime a runner, and one day he checked his pulse and found it was as high as when he was running.
He soon came to regret sharing this information with me. Whenever he announced he was going for a run, I told him to grab the wheelbarrow instead and move some manure. He finally put me on a daily quota: no more than 10 loads a day. Harsh for a gardener with big visions. Like Penelope, I worked on that proverbial shroud every day, but it was never done. I vowed to commit to my quota once another perennial bed was done.
He’s just finished edging an area that will become a new perennial shade bed. I’ll plant it tomorrow. Then he just needs to load the wheelbarrow with mulch and head up the hill. I think 30 loads should do it. Before he heads out to the mulch pile he says, “Ten loads are all you get. Then I’m going for a run.”
I’ve worn out one wheelbarrow, and I’m on my second. I’m also on my second husband.