There’s been a few blips in my publishing schedule.
The NW Flower & Garden Festival threw me off my game. This nonperformance online is only made funnier by the fact I pushed hard to perform my volunteer duties at the show. I introduced 18 speakers in 4 days, coming home pumped full of adrenaline. I’ve slowly worked that off and slept a lot this week. Now it’s back to some regular programming.
Introducing people and public speaking are both part of a long-term plan I’m on to challenge and overcome PTSD issues like anxiety and emotional dysregulation—but unexpected things happen when you interact with other people. For the first time, I was at the show all day, and in the evenings, I went out with my friends. That was a big change for me after decades of health issues. Up until now, I’ve always had to crash a few times, but not this year. (Although I have crashed hard since returning home.)
Processing in public, and even just with close friends, is a learning process. And I’ve said this before, so many people who garden are the BEST people. I was in good hands.
Since my visit to Seattle was longer this year, I took the train to save money. It was convenient, but my wardrobe was complicated, so I needed more luggage than was fun to lug around. It was worth it though.
My favorite part was having time alone to process before and after the show. I doodled, read, listened to music, and texted with various friends. I anticipated expectations, thought about what I hoped to accomplish, and best of all, I wrote a summary of things on my way home.
There were a few firsts for me up in Seattle, both personal and professional, and best of all, a return to a Japanese restaurant I’d not visited since I was a 16 year old girl helping as an ESL assistant to a Japanese cultural exchange program run by the Reverend Zuigaku Kodachi, who was also a Professor of Japanese at Lewis and Clark College where I later studied for a year.
While I was up there I was receiving regular texts from back home about the new fence finally going in along the southern border of our property. My neighbor (and friend) and I have been wanting this for 20 years, so it’s really been a gift for both of us. It had me thinking a lot about boundaries while I sat in silence gathering my thoughts at the show. Personal boundaries, garden boundaries, borrowed landscape in garden design, and projection. I thought a lot about the success and popularity of presenters. In my lifetime, the scales have shifted dramatically due to social media and that change is just, well, interesting. All I can say is that it’s the attention economy and it’s real.
As I watched speakers, taking in their performances, I was enraptured by the interplay between them and their audiences, the viewers. As someone who studied art history, I often have to remind folks that doesn’t just mean I memorized the names of artists, paintings, and sculptures in books. When I was a student, a great deal of my focus was on critical theory. I analyzed the manufacture of culture in a consumer society, I worked on interdisciplinary examinations comparing literary production and studio work, and I also was in school when the postmodern approach to looking at all of history with intersectionality in mind was in its infancy. All of these methodologies can be harnessed and used at the show. This is how my mind “people watches”.
With the current administration hating all of the above so much, I think this year I relished in my education more than I’ve done in years, and it brought me a certain amount of happiness as I watched people at the show. I think I’m old enough now to have a lot of information to compare, and it was fun to toss everything I was seeing around in my head. For me, that’s how I create, and ideas will come from this process in the months ahead.
Still coming down from all of this, being home is still sinking in. My neighbor and I are texting and sharing our guilty pleasure about the privacy the taller fence has made, and just how beautiful it is to stare at. We’re both already cleaning up our gardens, and are looking forward to spending time outdoors again.
Rolling words around, thinking about fencing as sword fighting, as a barrier, my mind turned to the idea of garden exposure, how I’ve spent years here feeling exposed as a person, thus feeling like I needed to thickly plant my now slightly overgrown feral space. To plant in order to hide.
Time in Seattle had me realizing that it’s also not my public site that has me feeling additionally exposed, but it’s rather my closed-off side that someone I look up to worked hard to crack last week. I’m looking at the garden I’ve grown to dislike in a flipped way now. Rather than overthink it—using words—I’m just going to return again to my education, and keep drawing, and playing. From the age of 18 until I was nearly 30 I dated artists and designers. I know the process, and will return to my version of it, thus feeling more feelings I don’t want to feel, but I need to do so.
So as I set out to redesign the garden to enjoy it more, I’m going to stick to the basics. While working to chip away at how I see myself in this design—even when I don’t see it. Starting with the boundaries feels nice and clean.
Re-examing the walls, the barriers, is a great way to redesign a space that’s so full. Smaller spaces are a huge challenge.
Garden exposures will be examined more thoroughly than I’ve done before. Light means everything to me as a horticulturist.
The north side of the house is usually the route I want people to enter the garden, and it’s been a challenge to lead people that way. Seen more as the service entrance, I think I can edit the chaos.
The back corner has us considering not waiting for the hedge to grow in, but maybe we want to replicate the new fence again here… (It was once a wall of arborvitae, but this half was shaded out and died.)
Could also be nice to replace the inexpensive fence on the east border in the back garden. I really dislike the apartment building back there. The owner recently put in a camera (maybe a bit difficult to see), and if we had a 7′ tall solid fence put in, I think a lot less would be seen of my space.
So yes, the new fence is nice and shiny. I have much to rip out now, but I’m excited about it. I’ve had the same layout for years and I plan to tweak it a bit. I want change, and I want to erase memories.
Feels good to take out the trash and to feel so fancy with this there now. My little vegetable garden space just got a major uplift.
To be continued…
Ann Loves Plants 
Leave a comment