Looking Back

Sometimes I can't believe what I gave up when we moved out west. I had extensive gardens in Connecticut and they were going on 10 years old, finally maturing. Our half acre was intensively planted, with lawn all around the plantings, and it was so very green.

In fall it sparkled, including the hillside behind our half acre that I was re-foresting with dozens of tree saplings.

My gardens were in a built suburb, but at the edge of forest and reservoir land, and we had plenty of wildlife all the time. Both good and bad -- the deer never left me alone, but butterflies and birds were always with me too.

It was so easy to grow anything in that wet climate. In fact, too easy -- weeds were constant monsters, too many things grew out of control for my tidy tendencies, and much of my gardening effort was simply beating back everything.

Sitting in my Santa Fe home on a cold winter day, I love looking back at photos of my old garden. It was my joy and it was beautiful. I feel like I should really miss it now . . . but I don't. And that feels odd.

I don't miss all the work it had become. My photos capture a moment of beauty, not the mess or the failures or the seven months of gray winter or the sight of unfinished projects. I don't miss the feeling of always being overwhelmed.

I don't miss the color green. The gardens and lawn were verdant for short times, but dead and brown looking much of the year through winter and spring. To my eyes dense greenery looks lurid and I kept wanting to break it up with flowering things or hardscape or something to alleviate all the green. 

I don't miss the jungle of tall meadow that surrounded our lot. In a wet autumn it was pretty enough for a short time if it flowered, but most years it was just weedy and ominously encroaching and densely forbidding. In winter it was a brown mess.

I don't miss the lawn. It only looked like a carpet briefly, and then only with lots of inputs and water in summer and the noise and effort of constant mowing. Grass clippings made thick anaerobic mats that were a problem. When it got hot, or when we had periods of drought, and certainly in winter, the lawn just looked awful. I don't miss it at all.

Here in the southwest there's a more consistent look. There are no lawns anywhere, so no swings from intense green carpet all around to being surrounded by brown dormant turf for months. Our neutral colored gravel yards here always look the same, so winter doesn't look so "dead". 

Shrubs and flowers here don't go from being lushly overgrown to sadly half dead if a dry spell hits. We're always in a dry spell here. It's a challenge to grow things, but not the anxious struggle to get wet-loving plants through a tough drought. Conditions here are dry, but always dry. It's expected, not the anxiety provoking anomaly that conditions in the east were.

I don't miss my eastern gardens, although I think I should. I like the cleaner, more consistent and more open look of gardens and yards here better. Soft adobe brown is a more soothing color to me than vivid green.

But how I love to pore over old photos, seeing everything I left behind, dewy and perfect and at its very best.