Bondage and Blooms

Gardening is a seasonal form of sadomasochism. I am living proof of this kink.

As in a twisted love affair, I worship gardens but recognize the submissive role I play. Each year, this tension comes to the fore just before Memorial Day. I am seduced by the beauty of colorful flowers but must succumb to their relentless demands -- botanical bondage that lasts until late September. My dormant desire for plants and the splendor of the garden kicks into an obsessive register and a dominant/submissive dynamic emerges. Gardening is a dirty, dirty business.

I am not the first to recognize the master/slave relationship between plants and people. In his seminal work The Botany of Desire, author Michael Pollan asserts that plants get us to do their bidding. They play mind games and control us. They slap us around with their never-ending demands.

Up for a bit of adventure, you go to nature’s leather bar, a plant nursery, or engage in some online dahlia dalliance, and become ensnared by various flora. You mingle, flirt, and ultimately decide to go home with some cultivars you barely know. Nobody warns you that you are about to be all tied up -- that you must slave all summer in service to this crazed affaire de coeur. 

Sadism's eponymous founder, the Marquis de Sade, was a perfect candidate for gardening. His scandalous 1785 novel The 120 Days of Sodom might be reworked as The 120 Days of Summer. For four months every year, there is more than a little bit of pain in the pleasure of the garden.

I attribute my plant affliction to my mother. She had a wonderful old Italian gardener named Joe who drove a red truck and made flowers and vegetables grow in her yard like magic. He made it look easy. Mom used to tour me around her garden on summer evenings to inspect and admire it, and to cut flowers to bring inside. That is how my obsession began.

Today, we have a substantial garden. From May to September, there are exactly twenty-three annual flower containers of varying shapes and sizes demanding to be watered. I have my own hardworking Joe who is of German descent, but watering is one of the few things around our home that he does not take on. When this whip cracks, it is I who must answer its call.

The safe word is “rain.”  It offers the only respite from the constant demands of my plant masters.

I have long known that I care for plants despite the ways they torture me. We’ve seen many masterful gardens in our travels, from French formal to California incredible to the best of the Midwest. Every time I behold a garden worth marveling at, the plants get their hooks into me. 

My hat is off to you if you enjoy the constant degradation of gardening, especially watering. It takes a masochist to know a masochist. 

As for me, I am counting down the days until late September.