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Oh, so many things my garden taught me as I played in the dirt. It taught me that gardening is not a seasonal thing but rather a life long endeavor. And that the joy of gardening is in the doing as will as in the viewing. Even those hard and sometimes costly mistakes are a part of it. It is an adventure. However, the one lesson that came as the hardest to accept was this: shade-loving plants will not thrive in the full sun and sun lovers will not be happy in the shade. It is a rule I have to live with. Just as there are rules in life that we cannot change no matter how we try.

A garden, any garden, will do what it is told to do most of the time. The secret is to speak the language of a garden. Few of us are born speaking this language. It is often difficult to learn from a book. Better to learn it by trial and error. Once you have learned the first few words you will find yourself totally turned off or totally turned on.

My first experiences were failures in the area of producing, but were sure winners in the area of learning to speak the language. I learned so many dos and don'ts. The first being, about sun and shade lovers. Often what I planted in full sun in the spring would die when the trees put on their summer frocks and shaded that spot. And plants that were shielded from the harsh mid-day sun in spring would be wilting in the noonday heat by July. I never forgot those things. There had to be planning. I needed to know my garden spots, the year round. These lessons were disappointing to my newfound zeal, but they did not kill it. Because I was eternally turned on and tuned in to what a garden had to say.

I learned that, as with life, you pretty much get out of a garden what you are willing to put into it. I knew at an early age that you get tomatoes if you plant tomatoes. But you also get what you sow in other ways. I never went about gardening as a means to an end, except in the very first attempts. After that, I went about it as you would go about raising a child. Looking to find the things that would bring about a life long return of joy. You don't put braces on a child expecting an immediate row of straight teeth. Neither can you throw out a few seeds and expect a real showstopper. You have to plan and dream; you have to reach beyond what you think you can do. I have spent hours just sitting in a garden-spot-to-be, just seeing it, in my mind, as it will be in five, ten or fifteen years, if I do this or this or this to it. There would be no joy in it

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