Gardening With Blurred Edges

Gardening is really a lot less about what you plant than about how you think about things--and what you decide to weed around.

I do have my raised vegetable beds, and my mess of perennial-flowers-and-weeds out front, but my garden is so much more than that. Out back, for instance, there was this small patch of wild beebalm, Monarda fistulosa, growing when we moved in. Whenever I'd cut some for drying, we'd also pull out a few of the other things that were growing around it, giving it a competitive advantage. The patch is now maybe 8 feet by 12 feet and growing, the plants reaching 5 feet high, and many of the scarlet flower heads sporting these interesting double-decker puffs. I leave these and harvest the singles for tea, encouraging the double heads to seed in.

Now that patch of beebalm is large enough to easily dry a year's worth of tea. My two beebalm cultivars that I have planted in the 'garden' out front don't do half as well. The bright red type I picked up at a nursery somewhere is being overrun by the lemon balm, and rarely clears 3 feet high. The lavender purple bergamot that I have in the flower bed blooms in a lovely shade over dusky gray-green foliage, but it suffers from mildew and expands only very slowly. I cut a few heads from it to throw in the tea mix for color, but that's about it.

I could order beebalm in various colors and configurations from any number of nursery catalogs, but why would I? Clearly none would grow as well and be as perfectly suited for the local growing conditions as the native variety that has adapted itself to this precise environment aons.

Other vegetative inhabitants of my yard that I've weeded around include red clover, a big patch of white yarrow that enfolds one corner of my lettuce bed, a couple of random mulleins that I always let grow each year (I pull out many of these from the raised beds but let some live at the bed corners, in the lawn or the flowers beds -- release them from competition and they will easily tower 6 feet tall or more).  Medicinal herbs like Heal-All (Prunella vulgaris) and Gill-Over-the-Ground (Glechoma hederacea) I pull out as weeds in some patches of the garden, and pull other weeds around to let grow in other patches. When I weed it out, I stick it in the dehydrator or hang it to dry if the weather is cooperative, for valuable immune-boosting winter tea come flu season.

Clumps of black eyed susans move around my yard each year depending on where I decide to yank them out and where I don't bother.There's some lovely pink mallow blooming under the birch tree that I weed around every year, and it slowly spreads. We've planted sunflowers several times, but don't really need to anymore. They also self-seed, and i pull them out when they are in the middle of a veggie bed but let them grow at the corners and elsewhere around the yard, often transplanting the young volunteers before their deep roots take hold.

Am I just lazy, or are there benefits to gardening without bright-line edges between what is cultivated and what is wild? I feel like the benefits in attracted honey bees, butterflies and songbirds (who love the sunflowers) probably does help the garden productivity, and it also makes it a lush and aesthetically wonderful, alive place to be. This state of mind also blurs the edges between my garden and the living world beyond where my deed says my property ends. A circumnavigation of my block this morning added a whole dehydrator full of red clover blossoms to the stash I'd picked in my yard.

I suppose my yard is 180 degrees from the artistic suburban landscape wastelands I've seen in the upscale neighborhoods of the greater New York area, and folks who prefer that highly structured look of exotic shrubbery with red mulch between and not a weed growing would view my garden as a mess. They'd likely hire landscapers to bulldoze the beebalm, heal-all, yarrow, mint and marrow and plant a proper yard of mugho pine and dwarf weeping cherry. While that might satisfy the realtors, I prefer the life and soul of this flourishing, diverse landscape that blends seamlessly with the surrounding natural environment (though admittedly not so seamlessly with my neighbor's stunning, impeccable lawn, but he seems a truly good sport about that).