In her garden, she does whatever she pleases

I am a solitary gardener. And it’s wonderful.

I share the yard with a partner who respects, but doesn’t fully understand, my love for gardening. And that is the basis for what I believe is probably the perfect relationship for a gardener. He doesn’t care what I do in the garden so long as I let him manage an ever-shrinking lawn in peace.

The garden is perhaps the only place where I don’t have to seek opinion or approval from anyone else. If I were to paint a wall in the house, I’d never do it without asking my husband to weigh in on the color, but in the garden, I am free to move plants around at will, or decide to renovate a bed that just hasn’t been working.

That’s not to say that I’m free from the occasional furrowed brow. While my husband weighs in only in broad terms, such as the desire to screen a particular view, garden visitors are occasionally more pointed in sharing their thoughts.

Private gardens rarely illicit strong opinions, but when I planted a dwarf apple tree in the main garden bed off the front of the house, more than one visitor questioned my decision to plop an apple tree in the middle of a perennial garden. I planted it there because it was a full sun location in a spot that needed a little height, and I happen to think that apple blossoms are beautiful.

I’ll be honest, I bristled a little bit at the naysayers and I probably kept that tree in that spot a little longer than I should have just to prove my point. It was finally relocated when I ripped out the entire garden and started from scratch in an effort to undo some of the design mistakes I’d made as a new gardener.

I’ve grown a thicker skin since then and I now find that inviting other gardeners into my garden makes me a better gardener. It’s interesting to see what catches people’s eyes or what plants go unnoticed. Often they are unusual varieties that I’ve lovingly selected and gone to the far reaches of the internet to acquire. We become blind to our own garden’s strengths and weaknesses after awhile, so a fresh perspective is helpful.

And although I take that input — well, some of it — into account, in the end I do whatever I please in my garden. Because I get the final say.

I’ve often wondered how couples who garden together manage to do it happily. Perhaps they claim bits of the garden as their own or become specialists in certain jobs.

Personally, I’m quite happy to toil away with just our Newfoundland dogs for company. They don’t care where I plant an apple tree, so long as I agree to share an apple or two.