I recently discovered profound happiness working in our backyard garden.
Nearly 30 trees shade our backyard. When we bought our home 10 years ago, much of the backyard was an ugly landscape of dirt and weeds. The lack of sunlight stymied efforts to grow grass.
At the suggestion of a neighbor, I brought in truckloads of dirt and spread it around to improve the soil base. It took years, but eventually green plants filled in the places where grass would not grow.
My wife did amazing work in the backyard. She transplanted groups of hostas, ferns, daylilies and other plants. She encircled trees with flowers and spread mulch. As the years passed, the garden she designed took root and bloomed.
I mainly focused on mowing the lawn and trying to grow grass while she handled the plants. My previous gardening experience was limited to vegetables. At our old house, I grew tomatoes, green beans, pumpkins, corn and strawberries. We owned a vacant lot next door and I kept a big vegetable garden.
There’s not enough sunlight in our backyard now to grow vegetables. There’s plenty of sun in the front, but it would be weird to start a vegetable garden in the front yard.
So I gave up growing vegetables. Once I got grass to grow where it would, my attention turned to plants covering a lot of our backyard. I’d estimate the ground cover is maybe the size of half a football field.
We have a couple of different types of ground cover, and both are hearty and prolific. I don’t know what they’re called. One is a type of ivy, and vines find their way to trees and start growing up the trunks.
Sometime last year I noticed the ground cover was taking over and invading places where grass was growing. Worse, weeds like Creeping Charlie infiltrated the nice-looking ground cover and were spreading into the grass.
Some gardening experts say Creeping Charlie is a great ground cover, but I hate it. I’ve found you can never fully get rid of it, but you can mitigate it. I pull out the plant and roots whenever I see it. I’ll sometimes use weed killer on grass, but I avoid using chemicals on plants.
In the process of pulling weeds, I trampled some of the ground cover and got the idea that creating paths would be practical and look good, too. I started making paths with gentle curves that created a sense of peace and serenity.
This spring, the paths seemed to have all but disappeared. The prolific ground cover grew back and nearly covered all traces of them. I decided to get serious. I widened the paths and pulled out plants by the roots. I turned over the soil. I covered the new paths with mulched leaves from last fall.
Working in dirt makes me feel good. There is a scientific reason for this. Researchers discovered that people exposed to “friendly” bacteria in dirt make more of the brain’s “happy” chemical, serotonin, according to a 2007 BBC report.
“These studies help us understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health,” lead researcher Chris Lowry told the BBC. “They also leave us wondering if we shouldn’t all spend more time playing in the dirt.”
I found the paths also brought a great deal of order to the garden. Paths help establish borders. Neatly trimmed boundaries are key to giving a garden a good appearance.
One day I showed my wife my work on the paths and told her I thought it would be good to get a stone bench or two and place them in the garden. She thought that was a good idea.
That evening we attended a reception for an an exhibit. We were talking about the garden with the gallery director, and I mentioned the paths.
“You should get a meditation bench,” she said. I told her we had just talked about doing that.
Some ideas are probably obvious to more experienced gardeners, but I don’t spend much time researching gardening ideas. I just like to work in the dirt. Pulling weeds and making paths is satisfying because you see immediate results.
For a control freak like me, gardening also is gratifying because of man’s quest to establish dominion over nature. Gardening takes patience. Yard work is never finished. A garden will never be perfect. You could pull every weed from a garden, but by the time you’re finished new weeds will have sprouted.
George Harrison, the late former Beatle, talked about his love of gardening in a 1981 interview with David Hartman on “Good Morning America.” He mentioned the character Chauncy Gardiner from the Peter Sellers film “Being There,” and how gardening was often preferable to dealing with other people.
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“The flowers don’t answer you back,” Harrison said.
We’ve had a wet spring. We got heavy snow in April and experienced the rainiest May ever in recorded weather history for Chicago. I like working in dirt, but I don’t like mud.
All the rain also makes it seem like there are a lot of mosquitoes, especially at dusk. There are many days when conditions are unfavorable for gardening. I watch weeds grow and see borders where plants need to be trimmed. The lawn needs mowing. Paths need maintenance.
“That’s OK,” I think, when I look out at the garden while having coffee in the morning or a beer in the evening. The last thing I want is to become stressed about yard work that could be done.
That would defeat the whole point of having a garden. Gardening has taught me to accept imperfections. You can strive for an ideal, but it may be impossible to ever realize it. You might, however, achieve greatness.