My father in law grew beautiful roses. He was a good vegetable gardener as well, but his front lawn was filled with roses and every few years he’d ad a few more rose bushes. He would often fertilize and water the bushes individually and he knew how to prune them properly so that the next year’s results would be glorious. He frequently said that he grew roses because they were easy and didn’t take much labor.

I, however, haven’t had much luck with roses. If we grow them in our yard, the deer eat the buds before they bloom. If we plant them in the vegetable garden, from which the deer are fenced, they need to be carefully mulched in order to keep them from winter killing. I lost the roses in our vegetable garden last winter from not properly preparing them. We had a very mild winter, with no snow, and the roses apparently needed more insulation from the cold when they didn’t have the snowpack surrounding them.

Truth be told, I’m not much of a gardener at all. I often neglect garden chores, allowing the weeds to get too big before giving them my attention, failing to water sufficiently, and planting according to my schedule and not the weather of the year.

As a result, roses are definitely not my flower. What I can grow is sunflowers. I often quote a line that I once heard from someone else, but whose origin I have forgotten, “I plant sunflowers every year because I can’t afford a Van Gough.” The truth is that I grow sunflowers because I can. They seem to thrive on my style of neglect. Basically all you have to do is to put the seeds into the ground. Some years the birds miss enough seeds that there are nearly as many volunteer plants as the ones I plant. This has been a good summer for the sunflowers. I have some giant blossoms that top plants that are over 8’ tall. There are a few weeds growing around the bases of the sunflowers, but the plants have outgrown the weeds and rise high above the competition.

I plant my sunflowers in the vegetable garden, safe from the deer, but I leave the blossoms for the birds. Many years the piñon jays will swoop down in mass for a couple of days of feeding frenzy and harvest all of the seeds in a short amount of time.

There are a couple of areas in our back yard that I devote to wild flowers. I purchase the wildflower seeds that are sold in the store and scatter them liberally on the ground. I make a little effort to weed the areas, pulling out the thistles and trying to keep the grass from dominating, but other than that, those areas are left to their natural path. That means that they are favorite feeding places for the deer and the plants that the deer love the best tend to decrease over time. Daisies, however seem to thrive. When a deer takes a chomp from the plant, it just grows back. So I might add daisies to the list of flowers that I have some hand in growing.

I believe, however, that my style of gardening, haphazard as it is, has a close relationship to the work and the results of true gardeners. A real gardener soon realizes that we humans don’t make plants grow. We can create conditions, prepare beds, plant carefully, pull out weeds, and fertilize, but the plants grow by their own internal processes, cared for by the wider processes of creation. There are lean years and abundant years. The greenness of the hills this year are the result not of superior lawn growers, but of the moist and relatively cool summer we have enjoyed. The lushness and productivity of the land comes from a complex relationship of weather and soil with a little bit of luck tossed in.

I’m aware of the contrasts because we have just returned from a trip to Washington where the land is wracked by drought and the wildfires are burning without limits. That country is normally lush and producing abundant crops, but not this year. Those who garden and farm in that place will need to wait for another year to show record yields.

Gardening and farming require a commitment to the land over the long haul. Those who go for short term gains often find that the cost is deep. Some forms of farming produce wonderful yields for a few years but are unsustainable over the long haul.

I’ve witnessed many homes that have been professionally landscaped and look so beautiful when the landscapers finish their work only to require so much maintenance that they quickly get ahead of the homeowners. I’ve grown suspicious of hiring others to make your yard look good not only because of the cost, but also because you make yourself dependent upon hired labor to maintain the beauty.

So we keep it simple around here. We share our yard with the deer and turkeys and other birds. They eat some of what we grow and we try not to complain about their appetites, even when they seem to go for the plants we’d love to leave growing. I mow the lawn and try to maintain a green space around the house, but when we have dry years, I allow much of the grass to go dormant and wait for the next spring’s rains. We plant a few things, including some new trees and try to care for them, but we don’t worry too much if not every plant grows the way we’d envisioned.

My neighbors don’t accuse me of being a master gardener, but they usually don’t complain about the condition of our property, either.

And I allow myself to be surprised and amazed at what the soil will produce. The giant sunflowers delight me as much this year as they did the first year I planted them.

Perhaps I’ll try roses again next year.

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