Once upon a time, my wife and I kept a really nice vegetable and flower garden in a space behind our garage, where the previous owners had fenced in a small area (to keep the deer out!) and added some good soil.
Very early spring
We really liked this and it was one of the reasons we decided to originally buy this house and make it our home, back in 2010.
Of course, one of the things about this little garden area was that it ran along our neighbor's fence line on one side... and this was actually just a long driveway; our neighbor lives on a sort of "center island" of land, only accessible by this long "dogleg."
Very early spring, 2014; that stone wall on the right is the side of the neighbor's driveway
I should add that we live on a hillside... aforesaid neighbor lives above us.
All went well, and we had a couple of years with some really nice veggies. The flowers bloomed; we had four lovely lilac bushes that offered up a wealth of blooms in the spring.
Unfortunately, our neighbor — who was a retired military man who really didn't care much about the outdoors — had a very old yard man who'd come along and mow and weed whack along the long "t-bone" driveway.
Happily growing, summer 2014
I guess he got tired of doing so... and five years ago decided he'd had enough and instead used a pretty potent weed killer on the greenery along the side of the driveway.
Along the side of our vegetable garden.
Uphill from us.
I noticed late in the summer that the driveway seemed just bare and brown, with not a living thing in sight. At first, I thought it was just because it had been really dry, but soon enough we realized that it wasn't.
We didn't pay that much attention, though... it was late in the year, and we'd already had most of our harvest.
Autumn and winter came, and with them the heavy rains. As I mentioned, we live on a hillside, and water (run-off) runs downhill... into our small flat area.
When spring came, something was clearly quite wrong.
Our lilacs just never leafed out properly, and there were no blooms. By the end of the summer, it was quite clear that 80% of them had died. The leaves on our apple trees looked weird and "curly."
The only things that seemed to be thriving were thistles, beggar's lice and our particular strain of extremely invasive Himalayan blackberry.
The blackberry gradually took over everything...
Given that poison had been used, we felt it was safest to not try to grow any food... at least until the toxins had worked themselves out of soil. Even our attempts to just grow a few flowers failed... there were tiny sprouts that then withered and died.
And so, we let the land go... this was almost five years ago.
Gradually, the blackberry vines and noxious weeds took over our little plot and it basically became a thicket of virtually impenetrable and very prickly things. The vines even grew over our former chicken pen, our shed and the end of the garage.
Late summer 2019: The apple tree finally bears fruit again, but the vines have taken over the entire end of the garden...
As time progressed, the thicket spread, and the only effort we really put into it was occasional attempts to keep the blackberry vines from "eating" our two lovely apple trees... which somehow managed to survive the poison attack, even though they didn't bear much fruit for a couple of years.
We did harvest some of the blackberries after a few years had passed... but even though they were pretty tasty, they were little more than a sad consolation for something that had once been quite lovely.
Mostly, we just passed by, and felt saddened...
The invasive wilderness, 2019
I suppose this all serves as a bit of a reminder that in LIFE beautiful and thriving things can easily be destroyed by careless outside forces we have no control over. We might think we're safe, and that something is ours, but even that is no guarantee of anything.
It also serves as a reminder that gardens need constant tending, and if you stop caring and just harvest without putting continual effort into them, they will quickly become unpleasant thickets filled with thorny vines and weeds.
The preceding is a 100% true story. But it's also a metaphor... I expect some of you will "get it," especially if you pause for a moment and think about it...
Don't let your gardens become poisoned!
Thanks for reading, and have a marvelous Memorial Day/Remembrance Day weekend, wherever you may be!
What do YOU think? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This personal essay is original content, and was created expressly to — in a rare departure from my normal publishing standards — be simultaneously published on Steem and HlV3.)
Created at 20200523 19:37 PDT
x021