In all the discussions of growth—the focus is most often on what needs to be grown. What is new, tender and needs encouragement and care. And this is as it should be—this is quiet, difficult , important work. Right now I have tiny foxglove seedlings in seed trays on lighted shelves in my living room. They were outside on my porch with other seedlings before the squirrels in my back yard enacted The Great Seedling Massacre of 2022 and dug up all but the foxgloves and the broccoli rabe. So despite it being warm enough outside to grow, I brought the tender helpless seedlings inside to get bigger before I can plant them out in the garden. New beginnings need protection.

But my August garden is reminding me of another side of growth that also needs attention and care, and that is when things become overgrown. Right now my perennials are five feet high: daisies, echinacea, black-eyed susans, butterfly bush—with some annuals tossed in—sunflowers, zinnias, fennel. So many flowers in a small place. Reaching up, reaching out, falling on each other, vying for space and sunlight. Collectively, if you like a bit of chaos, it’s beautiful. But it also needs tending. I need to prune back what has already bloomed which may allow the flowers to keep blooming. I need to cut back or pull out some flowers to give the rest some more air and space. I need to figure out which one may need to move to a location that better suits them.

While I have spent a lot of time learning and practicing beginnings, I am less practiced at the sorting that needs to happen in order for things to have their time and space. Mostly I have fostered the delusion in my garden, and in my life, that you can (and really, should) be able to do it all at once.

I think some of that is from the survival mode of trauma—you don’t learn to live in the now, so you are always protecting yourself from what already happened, and always hoping for and imagining a different future. You are never where you are standing. You overplant your garden because you don’t trust everything to grow. And you don’t deal with the current garden because you start planning the one for next Spring in your head. So-- the act of sorting, of prioritizing, which is such a necessary skill, remains unpracticed.

Working with what’s overgrown is working with what is.  And really, the kinder way to say that is acceptance. Or even, radically, seeing the overgrown as abundance. I want to sort through my life’s garden with the same questions that I use to sort through my flower garden: What am I growing that is important to me and what are the conditions that those things need in order to really grow and be effective? What needs more attention? What needs more space? What needs to come out? What needs to be moved?  

And what part of the chaos and messiness is just fine the way it is?

In the mornings, finches cling to my sunflowers and eat their breakfast. And all afternoon in the sun, bees of all sorts and sizes go from daisy to zinnia to echinacea. Swallowtails sit and flap their wings on my yellow fennel flowers. Sometimes, the overgrown can be nourishing. And sometimes it can be too much. The trick to knowing the difference is to really pay attention to what is getting nourished and what is getting crowded out or dying off. The trick is seeing what has grown.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD