Gardening psychoanalysis

"Tell me about your mother..."

I was asked by my mother to trim our cinder-block wall covered in climbing fig, which I did on Thursday. I didn't mind doing it. In fact, I was happy to. It's been a while since I've done any sort of yardwork or landscaping, which I do enjoy. It was fun until the process started to make me think of the disparity between my mother and I.

My mother has had this hedge trimmer since last year. When I went to the garage to get it, I took it out of the box for the very first time. The implications are manifold: my mom, with her traditionally hyper-realized gender roles, believes this kind of work is the work of a man, so she was waiting for either my uncle or me to do it; my mother has a fear of tools and technology, which stem from her communist satellite work ethic.

My mother was born in Poland in May 1948, a product of the Eastern Bloc's own brand of baby boom. She is the oldest of four children. Her father drove a truck during the war under Nazi occupation and forced labor. Her mother avoided forced labor by stuffing her dress with a pillow to appear pregnant when the soldiers came. My mother's parents married after the war and settled into a farmhouse with a thatched roof. My grandfather, like his father and forefathers for as long as anyone knows, were farmers - only now, Poland was a satellite of the USSR. My mother's work ethic is this: The best way is the hardest way; tools and modern practices make you lazy.

Ever since I was in elementary school, there has been a garden in my back yard. First it was a small patch just for my mother. It expanded with my involvement over the years. My father had no part in the garden because he was physically incapable, and my sister had no involvment because of a lack of interest, which somehow excused her from any kind of labor while doubly obligating me to it. Each year, as spring came, we'd have to weed and till the soil by hand. It didn't make much sense to me that my mom didn't want to take preventative measures against weeds (woodchips, mainly) in favor of days of backbreaking labor each year. This work was always dissatisfying and frustrating, and usually ended up in an argument.

Maintenence of the garden was mostly up to me. My mom did some weeding, I did the rest, and I kept up the tomato plants. My mother still doesn't understand that you have to stay on top of tomato plants and pinch off the leaves at the crotches of the branches. If you let these get out of hand, the tomato plant becomes bushy and unmanageable, and diverts most of its energy to green growth instead of fruit production. I also thinned a lot of the vegatation each year because my mom insisted on crowding the plants, which I still don't understand.

Watering the garden was always a big chore. When my dad was around he could water most of the time, but nevertheless it was time consuming and a waste of water. My mother didn't have any interest in an automatic drip water system, even though it would virtually eliminate the chore of watering each night (an hour commitment) and decrease water waste by at least 50%. I offered many times year to year to install such a system, but it never came to fruition. When I was landscaping my godfather's property (before we started building the house) I installed an automatic drip water system that was very effective. Anyway, my mom preferred constant time consuming watering to an effortless drip system and mulching that would both retain water and control weeds.

In the last two years of my involvement in the garden, I tried very sincerely to make it completely organic. No chemical fertilizers (I used bat guano instead), no pesticides (I planted beneficial insect attracting plants, like marigolds, instead). My efforts were useless, though - when I wasn't around, my mom was still using chemical fertilizers. She sprayed her roses with pesticides to treat another problem all together. Oh, the roses... she can't cut back and prune roses to save her life, and I've given up trying to teach her because nothing sticks. The roses look like hell now, by the way.

In the last few years I gave up on the garden - I just can't work with my mother in such a setting. My gardening fix came when I was landscaping and gardening for my godfather, my mom's cousin, and one of the biggest critics of the old-garde Polish work ethic.

Almost nothing is growing in the garden this season. Year after year I worked very hard at the onset of the season to ammend the soil (my mom didn't bother - dirt is dirt) - now it's a dry dusty patch that looks like no one ever cared for it. In many ways, it's just like the relationship between my mother and I: A source of constant frustration and conflict because of a fundamental lack of understanding on both sides, and, on her part, lack of desire to understand and pursue methods divergent from old country ways.