I Think I Actually Knew What I Was Doing

I stood in a garden center this week looking at a hosta with only one sprout coming out of the pot. It was $16.99. A few weeks ago I split one of the hostas in my yard into thirteen divisions, and every one of those divisions still had somewhere around ten to twelve sprouts on it. I started doing the completely ridiculous retail math in my head and realized that one plant had roughly 130 to 156 of the things this store was currently selling one at a time.

At $16.99 each, that's $2,208.70 to $2,650.44 worth of imaginary garden-center hosta money. Obviously that's not what my plant is actually worth, and I am not about to start individually potting 156 hosta sprouts and declaring myself a millionaire. It just made me laugh because I suddenly realized how much plant material is sitting around my house. More importantly, I realized how much of it is there because of decisions I made years ago without really knowing that I knew what I was doing.

We bought this house about thirteen years ago, and the yard was nothing like it is now. There were areas where trees, brush and weeds that had basically become trees had grown ten feet deep into the property. I started cutting everything back, clearing it out and trying to reclaim the yard. Once sunlight started hitting ground that had been buried underneath all of that growth, something unexpected happened.

The old yard started coming back.

There were hostas. There were random flowers and established perennials hiding in places that made it obvious somebody had once cared about this yard. I even found an underground hose setup. The person who owned the house before us had built a landscape, nature had swallowed a lot of it, and I was basically uncovering pieces of somebody else's work years later.

I didn't know much about plants then. I certainly didn't know the terminology I know now, and I wasn't reading about propagation, rhizomes, root systems, dormancy or any of the shit I apparently find fascinating today. I just started deciding what should stay. I cut back what needed to go, kept the things that seemed determined to survive and started moving plants into places where they made more sense.

Apparently, I wasn't terrible at it.

Over the years I transplanted somewhere around twenty-five hostas around the property. Those aren't little plants anymore. Most of them are mature mother plants now, two or three feet across, flowering every year and large enough that any one of them could be divided again into an unreasonable number of new plants. I have moved around forty chunks of daylilies too, along with peonies, cockscomb, cannas, ornamental grasses, boxwoods, mums, irises, hibiscus and probably several things I am forgetting.

I didn't do all of this in one giant landscaping project. There was no master plan sitting on a table thirteen years ago showing what the property would eventually become. I just kept working on it. Something got too big, so I divided it. Something popped up where it didn't belong, so I moved it. An empty area looked stupid, so I found something somewhere else in the yard that could live there instead.

The before pictures are almost funny to look at now. The house is the same brick house, but the property around it looks unfinished. There is lawn, a handful of shrubs and huge stretches where basically nothing is happening. The pictures I take now have mature beds wrapping around the house, trees, grasses, hostas, flowers, lighting, plants along the driveway and little areas that only exist because at some point over the last thirteen years I looked at an empty spot and thought something should probably go there.

The strange part is realizing when I was doing a lot of this.

Some of these plants were moved during years when I was drinking heavily. Some were planted before I got sober, during a period of my life that I tend to remember mostly through the things that were wrong. When I think about that version of myself, I don't usually picture a guy patiently building a landscape that would still be growing more than a decade later. I remember the alcohol, the instability, the things I regret and all the ways I wasn't who I wanted to be.

But apparently that isn't the entire record.

There is physical evidence growing around my house that complicates the story.

A person can be struggling badly and still do something right. I can acknowledge what alcohol was doing to me without pretending every decision I made during those years was worthless. I don't have to rehabilitate that version of myself or turn him into somebody he wasn't. I can simply admit that sometimes he walked outside, looked at a hosta and thought, "That would probably do better over there."

And the motherfucker was right.

Thirteen years later, that plant is enormous.

I think that is what surprised me at the garden center. The $16.99 hosta was funny because I suddenly understood the ridiculous amount of money it would cost to buy mature versions of everything surrounding my house today. But I also realized I couldn't buy what I actually have, because most of the value isn't the original plant. It is thirteen years of growth, division, moving things, learning the property and allowing small decisions to become established parts of the place.

Time did most of the work. I just kept giving it something to work with.

There are parts of my life from those years that I wish I could redo. Sobriety didn't erase them, and I don't need to pretend they didn't happen in order to appreciate what came afterward. But maybe I have been a little too willing to look backward and see only the things that needed fixing.

The yard tells a different story.

Somewhere in all of that mess, I was building something. I didn't have the vocabulary for it, I didn't have a plan for what it would eventually become, and I definitely wasn't walking around thinking of myself as somebody who understood plants. I just kept digging things up, putting them somewhere better and trusting that they would grow.

I look at the yard now and think I actually knew what I was doing.