I hate gardening.
There, I said it. But this makes me feel incredibly guilty.
However, I love gardens. I love flowers and fresh vegetables, decorative bushes and fruit-bearing vines.
It’s the verb I don’t like.
Maybe it’s because my parents didn’t do any gardening. Oh, sometimes my mom plunked a few chrysanthemums around the yard. And when they bought a newly-built house, my dad put me, at age 6, in charge of watering the shrubs.
Every. Single. Night.
My husband, on the other hand, loves gardening. I like watching him water his little plants and drop them gently into the soil. He is tireless.
But then, his parents did like gardening. Huge hostas bordered the shaded driveway. Azaleas, rhododendrons and hydrangeas provided lots of color and foliage around the property. His dad grew huge tomato plants.
So my husband does the vegetable and fruit gardening, while I’m in charge of picking it and preserving it. But I’m also in charge of the more decorative elements around the house.
Over the past several years, however, I’ve had a dilemma: When we bought our home 33 years ago, it was surrounded by trees. Now it’s not. So all the hostas and hydrangeas I planted had to be moved.
Back in the 1990s, I researched what to plant in the shade. My Reader’s Digest gardening book had a whole chapter about shade gardens.
Each spring, I bought flats of impatiens for the built-in box along the side of the house. Surely I could spend a few hours of work to have beautiful blooms all summer long.
Then, since the front of the house did get a bit of direct sun, I planted geraniums. It seemed I could not kill them with neglect, so they too became a regular fixture.
Fortified by my successes, I decided to try my hand at perennials. I’d long admired some relatives’ huge, flourishing hostas, so I planted some young ones in the aforementioned shaded box.
This was about 20 years ago. Then, about five years ago, we bought some rose bushes and hydrangeas at the arboretum.
Everything was growing nicely until the tall pines around the house began dying. Suddenly, all my shade plants were in the sunshine all day.
As a non-gardener, I was not concerned at first. Who cares if the hostas are the same size as when I planted them? But then, after their first glorious blooms in the spring, the hydrangeas were dry and brown by late June.
This year, I felt forced to move them into a more shaded area, which meant digging up the rose bushes, the Virginia sweetspire, and the hydrangeas and switching them all around.
I began in late March, when the days were still cool, and the plants had barely started leafing.
My husband, holed up at the desk for hours, said, “I hate doing taxes.”
My reply, “The way you hate doing taxes, I hate gardening.”
Digging up the plants, smoothing out the soil, pinning down landscaping fabric, putting in the plants, covering all with mulch. I became exhausted. My breathing was labored. I got dizzy. I felt so fatigued that I had to lie down.
My husband asked, “Why doesn’t all your exercising affect you this way?”
Good question. For some reason, after bicycling for 20 miles, walking briskly for four miles, pumping weights, or doing a fast-paced aerobic workout, I feel great.
But 15 minutes of gardening puts me flat on my back.
Regardless of my suffering, everything is now replanted firmly in its new home. All it needs is to be watered.
Every. Single. Night.
Luanne Austin, a former staff writer at the Daily News-Record, lives in Mount Sidney. She enjoys speaking to community groups. Contact her at ruralpen@aol.com or Facebook.com/ruralpen.
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