Lessons From My Garden

The 17th of October is Garden Day SA. To mark the occasion, reader regine le roux shares what she learnt from taming a neglected part of her garden.

- Regine Le Roux

It started with finally getting fed up with an overgrown piece of garden at the back of our house. My parents had both had an obsession with working in their garden – something I never understood when I was growing up. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. But the overgrown weeds in this part of the garden had become embarrassing.

The best – and only – way to tackle something like this is just to start. So I did. It was incredibly daunting and a bit overwhelming. But I started by pulling out the easier weeds and getting rid of the colony of snails that had found a false sense of refuge in this weed-infested wonderland. As I got to the bigger bushes of weeds, the roots got thicker and more difficult to extract, and I needed to tap into the toolbox of my partner, Mark.

Spending days hacking away at bushes gives you time to think. I realised the weeds could symbolise issues that come up in your life. As with the garden, the first step is to recognise that you need to deal with them. Too often we bury things in the hope that they’ll just go away, and I know now that creates a wonderful environment for these weeds (or issues) to fester and thrive. The longer we delay dealing with them, the longer they’ll have to establish themselves – and the more difficult it is to eliminate them. The sooner you address an issue the better (not to diminish how hard that is: it’s easier said than done).