{"id":2131,"date":"2006-07-08T22:48:32","date_gmt":"2006-07-09T03:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.1.5\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2131"},"modified":"2017-07-18T10:35:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T15:35:40","slug":"meandering-down-the-garden-path","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-essays\/meandering-down-the-garden-path\/","title":{"rendered":"Meandering Down the Garden Path"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been mulling over a question posed by Stuart Robinson at Gardening For Dummies: what are my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardening4dummies.com\/2006\/07\/gardening_goals.html\">gardening goals<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I let the question simmer in my mind while I mowed the grass, pulled weeds, and dead-headed the flowers. Although I am a very goal-oriented person in most aspects of my life, when it comes to my garden, this question had me stymied.<\/p>\n<p>I realized that I don&#8217;t have any goals for the garden, except the short term goal of surviving another summer in Austin. In fact, survival seems to be foremost in my mind whenever I do anything in the garden. It colors my plant choices, the times of year I buy and plant, and my decisions about having a vegetable garden this year, letting parts of the lawn die, or putting in new beds. The development of my garden is ruled by this one constraint: will it survive? If not, why bother?<\/p>\n<p>A goal implies a finished product, an end-result. It&#8217;s probably obvious to anyone visiting my garden that I have no real plan. Conventional wisdom is that you can&#8217;t get anywhere if you don&#8217;t know where you&#8217;re going. In the garden, I&#8217;m going nowhere; I&#8217;m just meandering down the garden path. That&#8217;s fine by me. I&#8217;m more interested in process than end-results. Gardening is about the journey, not the destination.<\/p>\n<p>For me garden is a verb rather than a noun. I garden to give myself space to think and because I enjoy observing the rhythm of the seasons. Gardening is a form of meditation. Few people visit my garden; it&#8217;s not a showplace or a place for entertaining or even a place to sit back and relax in. I find it impossible to si. a moment in the garden. In fact, the one place I have to sit is so little used that it has disintegrated and been overgrown with flowers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><img width=\"320px\" src=\"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/photos\/320\/20060705.jpg\" alt=\"photo: Zanthan Gardens\" \/><br \/>\n<i>In my garden, I&#8217;m not on a mission.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5345,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131\/revisions\/5345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}