Gardens for Friendship - Gardens for Sharing
One of the best thing about gardens are the way they are renewable and share-able. Incredible as it seems to the new gardener whose tiny, frail seedlings are surrounded by a seeming ocean of dirt, plants grow; once they grow up they need dividing. And they are usually most obliging if someone you know wants a bit to take home. Divide and pass on is a gardening tradition. The ease with which the established gardener does this can sometimes be unnerving if your own garden is new and paltry still. But that's what a friendship garden is about - plants that friends share to relieve that paltriness.
Of course, you may run into a seemingly generous gardener who looks too cheerful as they dig up a piece of an exceedingly well-developed clump of gooseneck loosestrife. The conversation out loud runs along these lines: "No problem," they say cheerfully (too cheerfully?) "I have plenty. Take them. And while you're at it, have some of this mint." And in their mind, it runs like this: "Let it take over your garden the way it did mine. I dare you to do better!" I ran into one of these early in my gardening days; at the time it seemed like a kindness. There was all that blank dirt in my yard!
I am still warring with the gooseneck loosestrife he so happily foisted upon me.
That was not a garden for friendship. One day too-cheerful gardeners of this ilk may find that the friendship, unlike a garden, is no longer renewable. They may wake one morning to find a hundred pots of loosestrife on their doorsteps, and a new pot of mint on their front seat whenever they are rash enough to leave the car unlocked. Such dire consequences may be eschewed only if these garden thugs were passed on along with stern and prominent warnings about their behavior.
True gardens for friendship are those where plants grow well enough that even the non-promiscuous, well-behaved and lovely can be shared with those who admire them honestly. They are gardens where the woolly thyme, no matter how difficult to grow, can always be divided a bit more so that a hapless friend can try it one more time. Friendship gardens are healthy, well-grown gardens.
Friendship gardens are often beautifully designed, except for one detail; it seems that there is always a wedge missing from the hosta, or an edge from the drift of phlox. This temporary inconvenience doesn't matter to the truly friendly, who know that they will soon fill in, ready to be shared again. Or that the space will be more than filled with things other friends share with them.
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