The unhealthy factor that I bring to our marital garden design dynamic is a resistance to change and a unwillingness to admit mistakes. Take, for instance, the stone fruit trees in our front yard. The “new normal” that climate change has brought to our region–fewer chill hours and drought–has greatly diminished the health and productivity of most of our stone fruit. It’s time for those trees to go and for the execution of a more coherent and attractive landscape plan. As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Landscape Gardening,

I know of nothing more pathetic than when a failed detail is allowed to remain as an eyesore in a completed project, rather than being removed and replaced by a better idea, simply because it has already cost such and such in the first place, and changing it might cost again as much. . . Once changes have been found advisable, though, it is also dangerous to put them off, for whatever is incorrect in the current situation will likely show up again in the execution of the new project.

Gardening requires a ruthlessness and lack of attachment that I often don’t have the stomach for. Sometimes you have to embrace creative destruction and curse that fig tree (or, in our case, curse the diseased and unproductive Nectaplum tree; the fig is doing just fine).

Time to get started . . .