"When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant." ~Author Unknown
I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me about an ad she saw in a magazine for a "real English style garden" -- a selection of plants that will transform your boring yard into a beautiful paradise. I laughed and said, "If it were possible to grow an English style garden in Utah, I would have one by now. This is about as good as it gets." She looked rather doubtfully at my midsummer garden, and I'm not sure she was convinced. But she's a new gardener.
This conversation reminded me of something that another friend told me. She said that when they do photo shoots for gardening magazines, they tweak up the garden beforehand. They bring in potted plants, freshly blooming from the greenhouse, to fill in the gaps or replace plants that aren't looking their best. They bury the pots in the ground and cover them with fresh mulch, making it look like the plants have always been there. We look at these amazing pictures and wonder why our own gardens never look like that. My garden is full of plants with bug holes, sun-faded flowers, and weather damage.
One of the most useful things I've ever encountered is the Happiness Equation. I like it so much that I wrote it down and stuck it on my fridge. It's a mathematical equation that goes like this:
Unhappiness = Expectations - Reality
This equation demonstrates that the degree to which you are unhappy is equal to how unbalanced reality is with your expectations. The higher and more unrealistic your expectations are, the more you will be disappointed by reality. You have two options for changing your level of unhappiness: Either lower your expectations to be in line with your current reality, or change your reality. If you are not willing to do either of these things, then resign yourself to being unhappy.
A few years ago, I met one of my customers at a local nursery. Our common friend, the nurseryman, introduced us. When the young woman heard my name, her eyes got wide, and she said, "Are you the real Diane? I mean, the Diane from Diane's Flower Seeds?" She seemed surprised. I don't know who she was expecting, but it was obviously someone other than the person standing in front of her. Okay, I know I'm funny looking. That's why I don't put my picture on the website. I don't look like anyone's idea of an impressive person. I'm tall, skinny and gangly, with nondescript brown hair and glasses.
She looked at me for a moment, then said, "I thought you would be older." I laughed. The one thing that I like about my appearance is that I look younger than my years.
Even though this was a comical incident, I've thought about it many times over the years. I've realized that people are always looking for the perfect friend, the perfect garden, the perfect whatever. They have idealized versions of things in their minds that never quite match reality. So they are always searching but never finding. I believe that people create the ideals in their minds because they are trying to escape from suffering. As the Buddha says, "All life is suffering." It's the non-acceptance of this suffering that causes us to look forward to an idealized future in which we will supposedly be happy because everything is perfect. I think that those who are waiting to be happy until everything is perfect will be waiting for a very long time.
There's nothing wrong with striving for a better future, except when it causes you to be unhappy in the present. Even worse, this striving can lead to an attitude of perfectionism that causes serious problems in relationships. People who expect their spouse and children to be perfect place a great burden of guilt on their loved ones and create needless suffering. Nobody is perfect.
Bill Harris says that perfectionism is simply a problem of having too narrow a range of expectations against which you measure reality. It's like expecting the thermostat on your heater to keep your house at exactly 70 degrees all the time. That's impossible. You would be much happier if you simply broadened your range to allow for more leeway.
Sometimes people write to me and complain that the flowers they grew from my seeds aren't exactly the same shade of pink or blue that is shown in my pictures. They don't realize that flower colors vary depending on the daytime or nighttime temperatures, the altitude of the city where you live, and the pH of the soil. Here in Utah, we live at high altitude with glaring sunlight and temperatures around 100 degrees in the summer. Our soil is alkaline, which can dramatically affect the color of some flowers.
Then there's the problem of taking accurate pictures. All photographers know that flowers look different at different times of the day, depending on whether the pictures are taken in morning, afternoon, or evening light. It's impossible for me to get an accurate picture of what a plant would look like in someone else's garden under different conditions. So people need to allow for some leeway.
I have an acquaintance who likes to comment that my garden isn't as nice as Temple Square in Salt Lake City (as if I didn't know that already). I don't think that he is aware that the flowers on Temple Square are not planted in real dirt. The native soil in the gardens was removed and replaced with a special potting soil-like mix. Furthermore, they have a crew of over 100 volunteer gardeners who keep it weed-free and deadheaded. They replace some of the annuals every two months or so with fresh, greenhouse-grown plants to keep it looking perfect. If I had all of those advantages, I would have a garden that looks just as good.
This fellow claims that there's no point in growing flowers if you can't make it look as good as Temple Square. Well, I don't worry about what he says because I've never heard him say anything positive about anything. He also said that he's just waiting to die so he can get off this miserable planet. I laughed and replied, "I'm not in a hurry to go anywhere. I'm having too much fun with my daylilies." I believe that you create your own heaven or hell on earth by your state of mind. Even God can't force you to be happy against your will.
I woke up at 5:00 this morning, wondering why I was awake when I was still so tired. Then I realized that I had been tossing and turning in my sleep because my stiff neck was aching so much that I was sick to my stomach. So I decided to get up and get gardening. There's no point in laying around feeling sorry for myself. As I walked through the garden, admiring the fresh daylily blooms that were just starting to open, I soon forgot my pain.
I think that the most important lesson I've learned in the garden is to give up perfectionism and the unhappiness it causes. I'm glad that I have a real garden, with all its flaws. I learn much more from this kind of garden than I ever would from a perfect garden. I also have a real husband, real kids, and real friends. And I'm a real person, too.
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