7 Surprising Lessons Gardening Taught Me About Relationships

Sam Llewelyn

I spent my holiday weekend digging holes. I am a gardener, and every year on Memorial Day I plant, and weed, and water, and generally launch my garden for the summer. I confess I feel sheepish admitting this, because I fear you will now see me as an AARP member with sensible orthopedic shoes. Undoubtedly, that’s where I’ll end up, but I’m not quite there yet.

I began gardening ten years ago, when we bought a house that had a formal garden already in place. The flower beds hadn’t been tended in many years, but the good bones were there. I jumped in that first summer, learning everything I could, mostly through trial and error.

I’ve learned many painful lessons, but also enjoyed many surprises and successes. I often think about my garden as a metaphor for life. Not in a cliched sort of way, I hope; I won’t trot out all the platitudes here about planting seeds and nurturing their growth.

In fact, gardening has taught me very specific lessons, many of them harsh. I’ve learned a lot about being patient and delaying gratification. Perhaps most  importantly, I’ve learned that most of what goes on in my garden is beyond my control.

Here are seven things the garden has taught me about relationships:

1. Forces of nature conspire against you.

Mother Nature can be a real bitch. In the garden, I battle insects, mildew, fungus, late snow, early frost, heavy winds, scorching heat and drought. I do my best to hold my own, to protect my plants and all the time I’ve invested. Usually I can mitigate the damage, but I never know what new hardship is on its way.

Relationships are like that. You might have something really good going. Then one of you moves. Or his ex appears on the scene, battling for his attention. One of you does something stupid while drunk. Or says something you wish you hadn’t.

In most relationships, there will always be drama. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s really a question of survival of the fittest. Can your relationship weather the storm?

2. The most popular plants get a little boring.

When you go to a nursery in the spring, you see enormous displays right up front of the most popular blooms: petunias, geraniums, marigolds. Everybody buys these, and I’m sure they account for a healthy percentage of any nursery’s profits. I’m not very interested in those plants. They produce a riot of color for a while, but they’re easy. There’s nothing interesting about them. I love to find an unusual specimen with atypical characteristics, like beautiful silver leaves, or bright chartreuse blooms. It’s those plants that make my garden a standout.

Do you go for the best looking guy every time? Are you drawn to men who look great but don’t have much going on inside? Or do you prefer someone quirky and interesting? How important is it that he make you laugh? How much do you care about whether your friends think he’s hot? Do you have the confidence to choose someone less showy up front, but a real keeper?

3. Weeds choke out bloomers.

Weeds grow like crazy in my garden. They’re everywhere. I have to pull them out religiously, or they take over. They crowd out my beautiful plants and choke them to death. The garden cannot be beautiful and healthy when it is riddled with weeds. If I let too many days pass without weeding, then I have a real mess on my hands. I look around and see nothing wonderful happening.

How many guys in your life are weeds, and how many are bloomers? Is there a great specimen right in front of you that you can’t even see? Are you spending a lot of your time trying to recover from the damage that weeds have done? Sometimes a weed can look a lot like a legitimate plant. Sometimes I have to wait and see before I pull it out. Before long, though, I can tell whether this plant is worthy of my garden or not. I am merciless in pulling out plants that have nothing to give.

There are some weeds that keep coming back no matter what you do, or how many times you yank them out of the ground. In my garden, I have to be vigilant about Deadly Nightshade. Its roots go so deep it’s impossible to eradicate, and I know it will keep coming back. Do you have a Deadly Nightshade in your life? Is there someone who you know is bad for you, who keeps reappearing from time to time, messing with your head? Remember that a weed that can’t bloom has nothing to offer. If you let it into your life, it will take over and leave you feeling ugly and miserable.

4. Sometimes you invest a lot in a plant, but it doesn’t grow.

Every summer I fall in love. I find a plant that’s new to me and I get a big crush. Before I put it in my garden, I do all the necessary research. Is the time for planting right? Will it get the right amount of light? Does it like the kind of soil I have? Is it hardy enough to survive a Boston winter? When I am satisfied that I can make it work, I go for it.

Lots of times it doesn’t work. I don’t know why. I’ll never know why. The plant can’t tell me why. But it died. I have a three strike rule. If a plant dies, I will replace it twice. If it dies three times, I give up on that plant forever. When that happens, I feel stupid for having wasted all the time and effort. I assume that a better gardener could have made that plant work. Any beautiful garden is full of spots where plants failed and died. You can’t see them, but they’re there.

Sometimes very promising relationships end without explanation. You tell yourself that you can live with it being over, you just want to know WHY. Was he not ready? Why not? Is he not looking for a relationship right now? Why not? Does he say you are just not the one? Why not?

We hate it when a guy that we really like loses interest. It hurts like hell and makes us feel like we are not enough. It happens to just about everyone. Repeatedly. We never will know why. All we can know is that we gave it our best shot. He left, but someone else will thrive in that same spot. Your life will be beautiful if you are patient. There will be slight scars or memories of those little deaths, but something more suited to you will have taken their place.

5. Devastating loss often creates new opportunities.

Every year I find wonderful surprises in my garden. A new plant pushes up in spring, and I don’t know how it got there. Maybe a bird dropped a seed from a plant in someone else’s yard. Once, when my next door neighbor cut down several mature maples, I was devastated. I had to leave my house on the day they came down; I found the sound of those saws incredibly painful and upsetting.

The next spring and summer, though, were amazing. Suddenly, plants that must have lain dormant in the ground for many years were coming up everywhere. My garden, which had been partly shady, was now in full sun. I mourned those three maples, but I love how my garden has changed as a result.

Are you open to the happy surprises that often follow a loss? Do you look for the unexpected pleasures? When something stops being part of your life, it leaves a space where good things can happen. You assume at first that you’ll just be stuck with a big hole forever. You focus on the loss.

When you lose someone, wait for a while and see what happens. Live your life. Expect the unexpected. You will be surprised, I guarantee it. And that can be wonderful.

6. To get underperforming plants to shape up, it often helps to whack the hell out of them.

I’ve been known to take a baseball bat to the trunk of a dying tree. It tells the tree, “You better watch out, here comes trauma, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll bloom like crazy next year.”

Many of my plants need to be cut back severely in the spring in order to put on their best show. Others need to be cut in half and replanted in the fall. To garden successfully, one must be merciless with discipline.

It’s the same in relationships. When things get lackluster, a little tough love is called for. Do you speak up when you are not getting what you want? If your relationship is not making you happy, you may need to issue an ultimatum that says, “You better change the way you’re behaving or you’re out of my life.”

Stand up for yourself. Demand respect. Your life will be lush and colorful if you do. It will be limp and dull if you don’t take dramatic action when it’s called for.

7. The best part of the season is when the garden is mature, and the newness has worn off.

In late August and September, the garden is fully mature. There’s kind of a controlled messiness about it. It’s a bit disheveled. It’s my favorite time of the summer. The garden and I have made it through another season, we’re comfortable with each other. There are no remaining fireworks, but much beauty still remains.

It’s like the feeling you have when you’ve thrown a great party. Everyone has finally left, it’s really late, but you don’t want to crash yet. You stay up late and have another drink and enjoy the success of it. Not everything went perfectly, there were some disappointments. Your roommate threw up, and what was that drama between two of your friends you didn’t even know were involved with each other? There were a couple of no shows, and someone you were interested in showed up pretty late. Still, it was a great party.

Mature relationships are like that. Yes, you lose the fireworks. But you develop that wonderful sense of comfort, of deep satisfaction that comes from making something work with another person.

Often we end relationships because we want to feel the explosions again. We crave the rush that comes from a new romance. Sometimes that’s the right thing for us. But if  you have a great relationship, and all that’s missing is the initial spark, think again about what it is you’re after. What do you really need? In the right relationship, when the fireworks have ended, much beauty still remains.

Related posts:

1. 5 Ways to Get More Control of Your Relationships
2. Why Relationships are Like a Bacon and Egg Breakfast
3. A Crash Course in Relationships
4. The Matrix of Modern Relationships
5. My Exotic Destination Theory of Relationships

Tags: beauty, beautyrelationships, Boston, crush, drama, fall in love, garden, gardening, getting what you want, love, mature, plant, respect, success, survival, three strike rule, ultimatum, weeds