garden therapy

So I did cut out at 1 pm yesterday (the student who was supposed to call me never did call - I don't have a phone message this morning). I went to my favorite garden center and dropped a big chunk of money supported a family-owned local business.

I couldn't get the basil I wanted; apparently there was a big run on it this week and they were all out. But I did get a few tomato plants - some romas, and a couple heirloom ones called "Black Prince" and one called "Pink Girl."

(I've been searching for plants of a variety called Arkansas Traveler, which is a pink heirloom variety. Best tomatoes I ever grew. But I've not seen the plants nor the seeds for sale recently).

I also decided it was time to do something with my north bed - the one on the side of my house. It gets sun until about 11 or noon, then is in shade the rest of the day. As most of my gardening experience is with full-sun-requiring things, I asked the nice lady at the garden center to suggest things that would do well, and just bought the stuff she suggested - so now I've got variegated artemesia, and some balloon flower, and some dead-nettles, and some sedum (Yes, she said it would do well in part-sun). And some kind of creeping thing - Mixia? Hoxia? I don't remember the name exactly but the flowers look like Scroph flowers (snapdragon family). I also got more thyme for the sunniest part of the area - I want to start a little bed of lowgrowing creeping things and maybe get some flat rocks to surround it.

Those are all perennials. I thought of going the "mounds of begonia" route but, meh. I like foliage plants better, I've decided, and I like the idea of stuff that will come back year after year and get bigger and bigger.

I also decided on my "two perennials" for the basil bed I'm going to start in the front garden - pineapple sage, which is edging out rosemary as My Favorite Plant Ever. It's just an all-around attractive plant - nicely shaped, sort of grey green leaves, gets nice and big and bushy, comes back every year from the roots, gets gorgeous red tube flowers in the fall. And the smell. The leaves smell the way I imagine Heaven would smell - sort of sweet, sort of incense-like, sort of spicy, and sort of green. It's a wonderful mixture and yes, it does remind you of pineapple.

I decided a couple of things while I was working. First, I still have the long-time problem that I've always had (and almost did me in in graduate school): I get too close to what I'm working on. I let my work become my whole life. If work isn't going well, then I suck and my life is terrible. I also have a tendency to give too much credit to other people's opinions (she says after getting up early to mow her lawn so the neighbors wouldn't look at her house and shake their heads). I don't know what to do about either of those things - they're problems I've had for a long long time - other than to recognize that they exist, to get away from the thing that's troubling me if possible, and to remind myself of the good things people have said to and about me over the years.

I'm also still a perfectionist, as much as I joke about being a recovering perfectionist. At least, I still am a perfectionist in some areas - I can leave my house or especially my office a mess and it doesn't much bother me. I'm not the kind of person who rips back rows if a mistake can be fudge-fixed or who rips out seams if the star-point on a quilt is nipped off by the seam. But I am a perfectionist about my work and I do need to sometimes step back and go "Is this going to be worth the effort I'm putting in to it?" Case in point: yesterday, I spent a good fifteen minutes searching online for a picture showing the basic evolution of multicellularity in animals for my general bio class. There is a picture in their textbook, but I don't have a scanner, and the "subscription" I got for free from the online textbook services had expired (note to textbook publishers: why not give profs free subscriptions to the online stuff that last the WHOLE time they have the textbook in use? Six months really is not enough). So I used Google Images and tried about eight different search terms, didn't turn anything up. Then I realized: They're not going to care. It's not going to make a whit of difference to them if I spend an hour searching for this or if I tell them "look at figure 17.whatever in your textbook."

That was the point where I bagged it and decided to go eat and go do something fun.

Sometimes, I tend to fit Santayana's definition of insanity: someone who redoubles their effort when they've forgotten their aim. I need to remember that there is reasonable effort and there is unreasonable effort. Spending ten minutes to find a good illustration of something is reasonable effort; spending an hour to find an illustration fitting a fairly minor point is unreasonable effort.

I had a colleague in graduate school who had a sign taped up over her desk that said "Detachment from outcomes" meaning she was to work at what she needed to do and not worry too much about how perfect it was when it was done. I think I need a sign that says "Expend reasonable effort." 'Cos this isn't seventh grade any more, and I'm not going to win an "Extra Mile" award at the end of the school year.