Quitter or Strategist?

When is giving up on something just being a ‘quitter’ and when is it good strategy to accept that your time and energy could be more effectively invested elsewhere?

This is a question about gardening.  I have previously blogged about the garden in front of our apartment here, here, here and here.  It isn’t the only garden on our block – 50m to the left as we look at it is another triangle with white oleanders and those cabbage tree things – and prickly green weeds and rubbish – lots of rubbish.

Success and encouragement, and neighbour participation, out front in year 1, made F think the experiment could be expanded a few yards long the road.  May Day and Mother’s Day aside, the flowers and plants put there by lots of locals have been largely respected and left alone for everyone to enjoy.  Everyone around here seems now to recognize my mad Kiwi mum and forgive her the eccentricity because she is, well, foreign. 

So sod was broken, rubbish cleared and prickly green weeds forced to share their space with less street-wise phyta.  And almost immediately a window was flung open above and a stentorian voice announced that if any flowers were planted there they would be cut – CUT.  The owner of the voice announced that she (for it was a she) was allergic to the smell of flowers.  This from a person living immediately above an oleander-filled garden right beside a row of huge eucalyptus trees overlooking a shoreline of long grasses and wild flowers. Four square metres of more flowers would be CUT.

F was crushed – but only momentarily.  Before long she had worked out a plan to plant things that rarely flower, or flower with tiny insignificant blooms and no scent, and are only insect pollinated (so don’t release their pollen on the breeze to irritate hayfever sufferers).  Of course there was that local element that had stocked the original garden with ostentatious daisies, but they had also supplied succulents, scented geraniums and rosemary.  This could work.  And for 5 or 6 weeks it appeared to work, the spider plants had established and were coping with days at a time without water, the NZ spinach was started to spread out (as ground cover it helps shade the soil and retain moisture). There were no daisies.  The aloes hadn’t been pulled up and the cats hadn’t scratched out anything important.

Then was the day it was all CUT.  ‘CUT’ clearly meant pulled up by the roots and cast under the wheels of passing traffic.  Not a flower had been in sight anywhere.

Crushed doesn’t describe it.  It took all my purring and furring to dig her out of that blue funk.  They say bad things come in threes – May Day, Mother’s Day (when all the plants put in to repair the May Day damage were stolen), and Mrs No-Flowers (Kyria Mythen-Loulouthia).

Is it quitting to redirect ones energy to a less controversial space overlooked by people who willingly contribute to its care if some idiot will only stick their head above the parapet and be the first one to be seen digging in the cat-scat?

And just to cheer us all up...from our FLOWER garden....