Behind the posts, articles, conferences and social media, there’s a backstory. Have you kept up with the digital correspondence between Ranters Scott Beuerlein and Marianne Willburn?  You can start here, or go back and find the entire correspondence at Dear Gardener.

Lovettsville, VA

December 19, 2024

Dear Scott,

It’s not fair to answer your letter the day after you sent it, and thus I’ll begin mine with an apology.  In light of the words you wrote discussing the pressures we put upon ourselves as gardeners, and as human beings, it seems particularly cruel to slam the ball back into your court without letting it bounce gently; but then again, that’s not the point of this correspondence, is it? Write when you have something to say, I say.

And that’s why I’m writing. Your hilarious story about the live Christmas Tree – and surprisingly profound thoughts about self-inflicted stress, frustration and failure – got me thinking about same, and I thought I’d strike while the iron was hot, or at least while the synapses were firing.

A tree in the old house – Christmases past when I’d schlepp all that out of a tiny attic with tiny pull down stairs.

Chillingly, I recognized myself in your story – sabotaging beautiful Rockwellian moments presumably in order to make them even more beautiful and more Rockwellian. Or at least I recognized a younger version of myself.

I’m quite good at self-induced stress. I always have been. It comes from having so many interests and wanting to live immersed in those interests, but coming up against an unyielding 24 hour day and a finite cortisol supply and/or bank account. 

As a gardener with ambitious dreams (and now a big property), it can take a toll if you’re not wise to the weaknesses of your own personality. And after a half a century on this planet (that really hurt to type out), I am at least wise to them, if not wise generally.

There are not enough hours in the day, disks in the back (I’m down by two), or dollars in the bank to do all that I would love to do here in my garden – much less all I would do inside the house using the beautiful products of all the stuff I was doing in the garden.  

I am often thankful we didn’t have the means to move to a larger property until we were in our early forties and starting to wise the hell up, because it would have been the death blow to an already strained adrenal system.   

 

These elves are now marked in a box labelled “when grandchildren come some day”

 

When I say that I would have been clearing the invasive understory here by playing shepherdess and chief bottle washer to a herd of goats (had I been thirty years old), I am not joking.  I have no doubt some of them would have been milk goats as well, and there would have been homemade soaps and cheeses churned out at four in the morning between milkings and adrenaline injections.

Just before summer ended, I was driving up my gravel road to town, and down it comes three goats (with bells), who proceed to cross into the posh neighbor’s second home (and garden) and down towards the creek — presumably on their way to the Potomac River and a new life.

I kept driving, and wondering what the story was (beyond the obvious “They’re goats. They escape. That’s what goats do.”) – and about 10 minutes later comes a young mom with wild hair and wild smile in mini van with hatch open and three kids under seven hanging out windows.  I didn’t even need to ask.  I told her which way they went and felt terrible that I couldn’t stop and help because I had an appointment.

I recognized her from about a mile and a half up the lane where they have homesteaded their eyeballs out upon buying a large property four years ago — and slowly, begun to de-homestead in the last year.  It’s harder than it looks, and damn that could have been me had the fates punished me with what I longed for a decade before I got it.

I’m feeling pretty lucky I escaped with only bees, ducks and chickens.

 

chickens

Love my chickens.

 

Still, it is very difficult to have ideas pop into your head that you simply cannot implement (be they goats or graded terraces) and must – however regretfully – ignore, lest they casually destroy the happiness you have found in the garden that you have; and in this way a smaller garden with its limitations is ironically, exceptionally freeing.   

I once had a friend who would come up with good ideas in committees and volunteer groups and then quite seriously expect everyone else to implement them for him. He actually got angry when other volunteers would shoot them down due to valid concerns over limited resources, or ask him to start working on them himself.  

“I’m an ideas man!” he’d proclaim, as if the rest of the committee was thick as two planks and just waiting for his pearls of wisdom so they could scoop them up and implement the hell out of them.

And yes I’m aware that I just mixed more metaphors than is currently legal in the state of Virginia.

It used to make my blood boil.  Because you know what? I’m an ideas man too.  Most of us are – we’re just reining it in because we’re also inconveniently the schlepping man and the money man.

In fact I’ve currently got the idea of replacing the black picket fence that surrounds my vegetable garden with a six foot stone wall; replacing my pre-fab cedar greenhouse with a Hartley Botanic; covering all the cheap blue stone dust with expensive fawn colored crushed stone that bathes everything in a warm glow; and creating three terraces on the south facing hillside behind said wall for a bevy of sun loving, zone-pushing beauties that will laugh at the cold air swirling past them on its way down to flatten the dahlias in my cool valley. 

Except that’s completely insane – says the schlepping man. And expensive – says the money man.  And I’m happy to say that I have taken counsel from both.

 

overhead shot of garden

Earlier days in the lower part of the garden with lots of dreams. Some of which have been implemented. Some of which have been altered.

 

Ideas must be matched by resources – and not the least of those is time.  If we’re too busy creating, we will never realize the joy of stewarding that which we’ve already created. 

I called it the ‘Creation Equation’ in my first book.  Happiness is using 25% of those resources (whether they are money, energy, or time) in the unfettered excitement of creation, and 75% in the quiet joy of stewardship (though I think I called it maintenance back then).

So, with way too many words used as usual, I completely agree with you that “Gardening and Christmas should be positive things we shouldn’t feel pressured to do at the highest level imaginable [and]…better gardening would get done if we don’t put too much pressure on ourselves.”

I’m thinking that means more time contemplating what we have rather than what we don’t, what we have done instead of what we haven’t, and taking time to notice all the miraculous connections between flora, fauna, and terra that we wouldn’t have time to notice if we were milking fifteen goats.

I don’t think my health insurance covers recreational-use injectable adrenaline anyway.

Merry Christmas to all of you Beuerleins.  And a hearty welcome to the new hip.  May you use it for good and not evil.

Marianne

P.S.  The illustrations in your letter were fantastic.  Frame the first one in case you ever forget.