<p>If you are in any doubt as to the impermanence of your garden, go away for a week during the growing season, and come back. If it has rained in your absence, there will be weeds everywhere. If it has not, there will be wilted plants. Go away for a month, and you might not recognize your garden when you return. If you sell your house, don’t go back a year later to see how the garden is doing.</p>
<p>My first house, in England, was purchased by a couple as somewhere for their student son to live and rent out rooms to other students while he attended the nearby University. I have no doubt that the small garden, which I had filled with little treasures, soon became a tangle of bindweed and beer bottles.</p>
<p>The next house, in suburban Toronto, had a bigger lot. After adjusting my horticultural expectations to the climate, I spent ten years transforming two blank squares of grass and some indifferent foundation planting into my best imitation of an English garden containing assorted alpines, perennials, shrubs, trees, stone retaining walls, and curving lawns. When the “For Sale” sign went up, total strangers began dropping by, telling me they had admired my flowers from afar, and asking if could I possibly give them a bit of this, that, and the other. I was kept busy digging and potting things to give away, and I worried that all the holes in the flowerbeds might put off potential buyers.</p>
<p>I should not have been concerned. A bidding war ensued between a builder who wanted to raze my lot to put up a “monster home”, first-time-buyers who had never gardened in their lives, and a Chinese family fleeing from Hong Kong who, if they had gardened before, would have been growing tropical plants. The Chinese won. I took them on a tour of the garden and pointed out all the plants of Chinese origin - Rosa hugonis, Miscanthus giganteus, Rubus cockburnianus, Hydrangea heteromalla ‘Bretschneideri’, various Magnolias, and so on – but I could tell they were sizing-up the back yard for a vegetable plot.</p>
<p>I moved to south-east Pennsylvania. My garden there, while in a warmer climate zone than Toronto, suffered from the depredations of deer, rabbits, and groundhogs. Ten years later, by trial and error and with the marvel of nearby Longwood Gardens to give me encouragement, I had accomplished the near-impossible and was growing a wide range of ornamentals in three large island flowerbeds plus some smaller beds near the house. Once again, it was time to move. The buyers agreed to do their best to maintain the former swimming pool that was now a lily-pond full of goldfish, and although they were moving from Florida they had previously lived in a cold climate zone, and so I crossed my fingers that the garden would be in good hands. That was before the house inspection and the report on the state of the septic system. It turned out that (a) I had constructed a flowerbed on top of the drain field, (b) the drain field was on its last legs and needed to be replaced, (c) the only area available for the new drain field was where another flowerbed was situated, and (d) the sewer pipe from the house to the new drain field would go straight through the middle of the remaining flowerbed. We mercifully moved before construction began.</p>
<p>Now I’m gardening in Ontario again. We’re north of Toronto and at a higher elevation, so it’s colder, but there are fewer deer than in PA. Since we’re out in the countryside there’s a constant bombardment of airborne seeds such as dandelion, thistles, golden rod, aster, milkweed, plus all the grass, tree, and vine seeds dropped by birds and small mammals, and so weeding is a full-time occupation. I estimate that my now ten-year-old garden would last just a couple of months before reverting to pasture and forest.</p>
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