The exuberant flourishing of summer

There is a bulging, bursting, vining, tangling, wild spirit in my garden. Or I should say there are a myriad of spirits in my garden.

The middle of a summer with enough moisture is the time when it is the easiest for me to have an animist worldview. It is easy to see the will power and personality of each different kind of plant and animal. It is easy to relate to them as members of a family to which I too belong because they are so full of life.

Image by Arie Farnam

Our ducks have produced babies and the tiny speckled ducklings hop and tumble through the riotous foliage in the corners of the garden.

The combination of long, warm summer days and enough rain makes for an abundance that is overwhelming and often too much. At some unremarked tipping point, my job went from trying to coax plants and animals toward thriving to the tough love of cutting away the excess, sometimes with tender care, sometimes in wide slashes.

Many things grow better when they are trimmed back. The tomatoes would quickly mold and rot without my careful pruning. Many of the herbs would just lie in tangled, bug-infested heaps if I didn’t trim them. And of course, there is a profusion of weeds that would gladly overtake and shade useful plants if I let them.

But I don’t cut where I don’t have to. That is a common mistake among modern gardeners and farmers. There is an assumption that just because I don’t need that plant. it shouldn’t grow. But the fact is that this flourishing, bountiful life force abhors bare soil. There is nothing so unnatural as bare dirt in a mid-summer garden.

So, wherever I can, I let something cover it. I may pick and choose and weed out but something ends up covering the soil.

This year it sometimes pains me to cut back exuberant plants that are not strangling weeds. The past three years brought drought and while weeds grew where I watered, my garden was not nearly so lush. After a time of scarcity we have a tendency to allow excess, even to the point that it isn’t healthy.

My husband says this summer is the way summers were here when he was a kid—several days of sun and then thunderstorms and drenching rain. Artificial irrigation was once almost unknown in Central Europe. Farmers used to say the lightning made the fields fertile and apparently there is a bit of scientific truth in that, beyond just the fact that after lightning comes the rain.

This year our garden is a little bit much. Everything is growing like crazy, spilling out of containers and beds. I frantically pull weeds, clip and mow and still barely keep ahead of a green tide that threatens to overwhelm me. Untended areas have turned into impenetrable jungles of brush and herbage six to ten feet high.

I sense the plants as I move about the garden, each one has a distinct spirit. Some are eager, some pushy. Some are much more timid and delicate. But they are all aware of each other. That doesn’t mean they won’t take over the space and strangle out a less assertive plant. There is a harmony here, but it isn’t entirely equitable. And neither am I.

Still I don't sense resentment from the plants that I cut away anymore than I feel that the invasive weeds mean to be aggressive. We are just all in it for survival. Ascribing spirit to plants doesn’t mean anthropomorphizing them. Plants are plants not humans and they view the world from that perspective.

This wild, luscious growth is an expression of the plants natural state of being. Their desire for life and growth doesn’t negate their interconnection and a deeper understanding that every other part of the garden is connected and necessary, even the woman who weeds and clips.