The Master Gardener

Gardens, like pets, often reflect their owners (unless they are being outsourced to a gardener, in which case, they really just reflect their owner's bank account.) In the sixteen years' I've been married, I've had all sorts of different gardens, but I've never yet managed to move into a house where the garden was 'done'. In each house we lived in, the garden was either a patch of dry earth around a new-build house, or a patch of massive weeds around an older house.
 
The latest house, the latest garden, was a new-build with a weird shaped, small patch of earth around it, when we moved in three years' ago. One thing I learned from all my moving around is that the sooner I plant something, anything, the more I'd enjoy my home, even if I was only there for a year or two.
 
So I got to work almost immediately, and planted a whole bunch of stuff. I could see the garden needed a bit of 'hard landscaping' as well, but I didn't know what. I looked over the neighbor's fence, saw that they'd stuck down some stepping stones, and I found someone to put a few down in my garden, too, to give it a bit of form.
 
Three years' on, some parts of the garden looked really nice, but one patch in particular really didn't. There was a bunch of nice plants all over the place, but it all looked quite random, and not so pleasing to the eye.
 
I know that you make more 'impact' when you plant the same thing 50 times over, but that sort of rigid design is so not me. I like things more free-flowing, more relaxed, more individual. And as a result, parts of my garden really looked like a disordered mess.
 
A month ago, for the first time ever, my husband got involved in one of our gardens. He was sitting on the patio, having a cold drink, when he mentioned that he thought some hard landscaping and a small water feature would look nice in the 'bad' patch. The next day, he'd bought the wood, he'd knocked it together, he'd found the water feature and he'd picked out a bunch of plants to go with it.
 
After one morning of him working on it, the 'bad' patch looked amazing.
 
One of my habits is that I try to learn something from everything that G-d does or arranges in my life. As I sat outside, next to the tinkling little water bowl thing, I mused on how we sometimes need a measure of 'hard' to really make all the 'soft' fall properly into place.
 
I'm so not a big fan of strictness or rules. As a result, my kids snack all over the house, and I find ant-covered mouldy fruit in all sorts of weird places; sometimes, they don't get to bed at a good time, and then they are too tired for school the next morning; sometimes they flush, sometimes they don't, and I have to run around like a crazy woman flushing toilets before I can let any guest use the bathroom.
 
I looked at my hard landscaping, and I realized that some rules, some structure, some boundaries are not only a nice idea, they are exactly what we need to bring out our real potential and spiritual beauty.
 
Sometimes, G-d appears to cut us off and curb us and contain us just as we were about to go stratospheric: all of a sudden, the successful business flounders; or the previously fertile woman finds she hasn't had any more kids for a decade; or the social group starts to shrink at a scary rate of knots.
 
These things can feel so hard and constraining. If we don't have the perspective of the Gardener, of G-d, it feels like all our vitality, our life, our blossoming beautifulness, is being buried under a ton of concrete and wood. But really? Really, G-d is just amending the design, to ensure that the garden – us – is going to go from strength to strength, and will only look even more beautiful in the coming years.
 
One of my neighbors ran out of cash to pay for the weekly gardener last year, and within a few short months, her once-beautiful garden went berserk. Everything was overgrown and fighting for space; the most beautiful plants became spindly and ugly-looking, putting all their effort into trying to find their place in the sun.
 
When the gardener was reinstated, he cut an awful lot of things down, pulled other things up, and started from scratch in quite a few places. Very quickly, her garden looked so pretty again.
 
Hard landscaping is hard. I guess that's the point. But souls, like gardens and teenagers, sorely need some structure to really become the best they can be. And G-d, the Master Gardener, knows exactly what constraint, what rock, what hard place, is required for each of us.
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy's new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush