Gardening As Restorative

By Marylyn Cork

It’s a beautiful morning as I write. The sun is a little too warm for comfort, beaming like a jolly fellow from a blue, blue sky. Not a cloud up there, and the little cooling breeze that so often blows up from the river and rustles the trees in my yard has not made an appearance yet today. I don’t thrive in heat, so I am inside instead of deadheading my flowers as I intended.

I finally finished weeding out the entire lot yesterday for the first time this year. It took me over two months after the good weather eventually set in, laboring two or three hours a day at what I call “grunt work.”

I have a lot of flowers, and the weather did not cooperate very well until after the Fourth of July. Because I nursed a broken right wrist all last summer, I was unable to keep up with my yard work and two rainy springs in a row did wonders for blossoms, but also for the quack grass, Japanese clover, fescue, creeping buttercups and violets, and just plain weeds that torment me.

My yard has never been more beautiful, nor such a time-consuming tyrant.