Yikes, I’m turning 60 

First of all, let me say that I am not a sentimental person.  I rarely buy sappy cards and I don’t watch the Hallmark channel.  I prefer to go through life enjoying each day as though it were my last.  I like to joke and make light of life’s follies and my favorite mantra is “It will be fine”.  I have no doubt that my family would love to put that on my tombstone.  Too bad I’m planning on having my ashes strewn over the compost pile.

Tomorrow, October 30^th is the official day when I start my 7^th century of existence.  That alone is a sobering thought.  But for today I am still in my 50’s.  That sounds very youthful to me, unless of course you think of it as a half a century.  I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.  I’ve always liked the saying, “40 (or 50 or 60) isn’t old if you are a tree”.  In that case I guess I am still just a sapling. 

As I reflect on my first 60 years I have to confess that plants have always played a major role.  I grew up in a small town in southern California where it was so easy to grow things that all you had to do was stick a cutting in the ground and away it went.  I remember breaking off pieces of succulents and sticking them in small terra cotta pots filled with a sandy soil and forgetting about them.  A few months later they were rooted and growing leaps and bounds.  To a 10 year old this was pure magic.

All through my youth I was considered the neighborhood yard boy.  I raked leaves from Mrs. Brown’s ever-shedding southern Magnolia, sifted tree and shrub roots out of the annual beds for Auntie Corrine, pruned and weeded for Mrs. Dickie and planted summer annuals for Mrs. Hamilton.  If there was yard work to do, I was the “go to” kid on the block.  And while these jobs put some money into my pass book savings account, they also fueled my ongoing curiosity of the plant world.

Ferns fascinated me.  They seemed so primitive and soothing.   Annuals on the other hand excited me and I couldn’t wait until the local garden center got in their spring crop of dwarf marigolds, bedding asters and ageratum.  Bulbs were another amazing creation in the plant world to me.  I remember planting gladiolas, dahlias and tuberous begonias and waiting impatiently for them to come into bloom.  I was drawn to the wild foliages of coleus, caladium, colocasia and tropical succulents.  Whatever a plant had to offer, be it colorful flowers, vibrant foliage, interesting bark or berries, it all captured my interest. 

At 14 years old to took my first real job at the local nursery and I was in heaven.  I got to get dirty planting roses, stack smelly bags of chicken manure, carve out a dozen marigolds from a solid wooden flat and place them in a little cardboard tray using a masonry trowel, soak clay pots until they stopped bubbling so they wouldn’t suck all the moisture out of the soil when we planted tuberous begonias in them and line wire baskets with sphagnum moss to just the right thickness so the soil wouldn’t fall out between the wires.  I even learned the technique of cutting tin cans with a special can cutter.  This was all pretty cool stuff to me.

Plants continued to interest me throughout high school and I eventually went on to college to study horticulture.  After a stint in the Peace Corps and the US Army I settled down to a career as a Landscape Contractor in California and in 1989 moved to Washington to take over the Sunnyside Nursery.  The rest as they say is history. 

After all these years of working with the dirt and the plants one might be tempted to ask for a few words of wisdom.  While I would never consider myself very wise, I have to admit that as I reconsider my first 60 years a realization has dawned on me.  The world is full of different kinds of gardeners, all equally passionate about what they want in their yards.  It was true 60 years ago and it will be true 60 years from now.   Mrs. Brown and Auntie Corrine of my youth loved their ponds.  Aunt Trixie and Uncle Willie were native plant enthusiasts.  Mrs. Hamilton lived for her displays of summer color.  And Uncle Paul couldn’t think of not having his cymbidium orchids.  Each one of these gardeners had developed a gardening style that brought them pleasure.  I was the lucky youngster that got to experience it.  I can only hope that my next 60 years will continue to bring me in contact with gardeners as passionate as the ones of my youth.  I wish the same for you.