The Fourth Dimension

Time is the fourth dimension in gardening. It sets landscape design apart from the other arts. It is as tangible as scent and color and form. The garden grows. It changes, often without the gardener's input or permission.

In the years I began my gardens in the east, I had to learn that. I had to wait and wait for a design to develop and plants to fill in, and that wait was years long. Planting trees taught me deep patience; planting perennials taught me restraint, planting annuals taught me rhythms and seasonality.

Here in a new place I'm now familiar with the concept of time in the garden. My desert willow tree is a twig and won't be anything else for years. Shrubs and flowers that form the backbone of my design are slowly composing themselves in a way I hadn't originally wanted. Stuff dies and must be replaced. Other stuff hasn't filled in yet and will look so different when it does. It takes time and purely imagined scenes over the years to get it right.

The time it takes plantings to mature is slow and endless, but the way time rushes each season is chaotic. Plants don't all wake up to become a garden in spring. Instead, they emerge in waves and in dribs and drabs and in explosions, and in starts and fits, all on their own peculiar schedules. While I wait and wait to see some favorites, others jump up, some are gone, some just won't behave.

There is a brief -- very brief -- moment when it's all cohesive. It looks static and perfect and what I wanted for just that moment. Then it changes.

Other dynamic forces scramble the art of gardens: storms, weather, living beings like bugs and pests. Add in the passing of time, and a garden becomes what it will.

My garden will become something -- not what I envisioned, but something -- over long, long years, when it isn't rushing by in a fit of springtime.