LEAVING A GARDEN IS LIKE leaving a marriage—it’s an abandonment of the plan. The plan, which, in the perennial garden, extends beyond death. “When we were planning our first backyard perennial garden,” reads the introduction to Successful
Perennial Gardening, “a visitor from England told us that it takes a minimum of 50 years to create a garden and, if possible, one should allow 200 years.”

The garden is Antoni Gaudí’s cathedral, which he knew he would never live to see completed. Even so, it’s hard to leave. I walk from window to window, wondering if I’ll ever live anywhere again where what I see from each room are the trees I’ve planted. I dug into the dense clay for them, the digging an act of devotion, to what? To the future?

Time is what you garden, in the end. Plants come and go, but time continues. The rhododendron in the corner by the yew was a long time coming. I studied that corner for a decade, considering my op-
tions, auditioning some failures. During the heat of summer, the rhododendron recedes into shade, but when it blooms in April, it lives in a ray of light that illuminates every blossom. Just as I planned.

How much of the pleasure of making a garden is in the plan? It is a collaboration with God—you plant your bulb, a prayer cased in tissue-
thin skin, prone to rot, dropped into the damp earth, and then, months later, the prayer is miraculously fleshed forth in petals. Once, thinking I would teach a lesson on miracles, I arranged for every child in the fifth grade to plant a giant allium bulb outside the entrance to the school. A crowd of purple globes waited for them on the day of their graduation, as I had planned, but I had not planned for the empty schoolyard of the pandemic. “Your graduation flowers are blooming,” I still say to my son every year, though he no longer remembers the bulb or the plan.

Time is what you garden, in the end. Plants come and go, but time continues.

I’ve visited formal gardens in France where the plan is the garden. Thick with hardscaping, those are gardens of pea gravel and antique hothouses, of stone basins and elaborate fountains. The plants are almost an afterthought. They must assert themselves, like the bristle of cardoons in Jardin des Plantes, huge and spiky, contained within a tidy bed, iron-edged, that comes to a point where two paths divide.

Pressed within the pages of Successful Perennial Gardening, I find several hand-drawn plans for a bed in my backyard. That bed is full and flourishing now, but the plans seem not to have been successful. I planned asters that were destroyed by rabbits, and I planned poppies in too much shade. Against the advice of Successful Perennial Gardening, I planned plants that preferred moist soil next to plants that preferred dry soil. I wanted to plant garlic among the daffodils, but I never did. Only the echinacea and the bee balm survived my plans—fitting, in that bee balm is what thrives in an abandoned garden. The plan, I understand, has already been abandoned many times over.

Have I learned to meet the conditions? Am I yet a gardener? The Concord grape, which required three years of preparatory pruning, has proven too much to handle, too heavy for the wires anchored in the brick of the house, too absurdly robust. It will damage the screens on the windows, but it’s already forming the grapes that will ripen after I’m gone.

There’s a kind of garden I’ve always admired but never allowed myself. It’s the garden of whim and improvisation. Whirligigs spin in the wind, rebar is put to sculptural purposes, stuffed animals are inexplicably affixed to fence posts. There’s a rusty machete in the shed, but the pokeweed is in its glory, claiming its place as an ornamental, attracting birds with cascades of inky berries on fuchsia pedicels. In an ambitious moment, someone dug a small pond, which is now thick with algae and alive with frogs and mosquitoes. This garden is not for show. The plants run it. They are shoulder-high, brimming with vigor, of another epoch. This is the kind of garden that draws complaints from neighbors, that brings down the property value, that attracts rats. And this is where I’m headed now, into the tall grass of the unplanned.