Home: In the Garden: War of the Roses

Charl’s garden aesthetic is firmly rooted in the distant past, when the greater world seemed a wild and woolly place, and your backyard plot was a chance to impose order on the chaos of nature. Charl likes straight rows, clean edges, precise lines. She goes in for neat, petite shrubs, restrained clumps of hosta (which she slices to the ground after blooming), bright patches of evening primrose that never get too tall or leggy, and urns planted with symmetrical arrangements of geraniums and ornamental grass.

Me, I like to think I’m more modern. More romantic. If Charl is Vermeer, I’m van Gogh. One of my favorite plants, in fact, is sunflowers, because they grow out-of-control tall and sprawl all over the place and attract lots of birds. Charl would just as soon birds stayed the hell out of our town, I think.

I like big. I like wild. I love surprises — the volunteer four-o’clocks that pop up out of nowhere, the kaleidoscope colors my chrysanthemums mutate into. I like roses that ramble, sweet-pea flowers that twine and climb, and anything that self-seeds. My idea of perfect happiness is standing in the rain on St. Patrick’s Day, broadcasting the first direct-sow seeds of the year — larkspur, poppies, cornflowers — into wet brown ground, because I won’t have to water! I’m a lazy gardener. I hate to weed and prune. I don’t bother starting seeds indoors anymore. I want a garden that’s easy, and rough.

So Charl wants to tamp down my wilderness, and I want to shake up her primroses. Our contrary purposes play out in various ways. She feels justified, for instance, in uprooting my morning glories when they wander through the fence onto her property — and in taking clippers to my forsythia when it gets rangy. The first time she did that, I was taken aback — how dare she try to make me play by her rules? But then I got to thinking. My garden starts out each season in bounds. It’s only by late August that my sunflowers are towering above our shared fence, casting shade on her tomatoes, and that she’s busily uprooting a yard full of nigella whose seeds the birds spread from my yard to hers. There are all sorts of ways of imposing on our neighbors. Some are virtual, like my beloved trumpet vine, that Charl shaves off with a buzz saw on her side of the fence every year (which, I enjoy noting, only seems to make it spring back more enthusiastically). Others are more cerebral: Knowing that my garden’s freewheeling chaos bugs Charl only makes me a little less inclined to reel it in.

And so we have a fence between us, that insubstantial chain-link Berlin Wall. Charl thinks it’s all that’s holding back the rampaging Mongol hordes of my sunflowers. And me? I think it’s the perfect structure on which to train unruly nasturtiums and clematis. No one’s ever really a winner in a war of aesthetics. But in a microcosmic way, our fence lets both Charl and me believe we’ve won.