You can't garden, you can only maintain.
You can't think for yourself, just do what the boss says.
Don't think, just do.
What were you thinking? Why didn't you ask me. Why DIDN'T you do this. I want you to think. It's not your garden, you have to do what the client wants. But the client doesn't know what they want. Do what the manager says. But the manager isn't a gardener. Ask for his approval. I have to know. Why don't I know. Tell me, communicate. I can't communicate on the phone, I'm busy gardening. Txt me. I thought you had said you finished the garden. No I said finishing, not finished. You should be finished by now. I'm not finished yet. The finish is the most important thing. No garden is finished. If a garden is finished, I would be dead and buried and you would be the one gardening my grave.
And so it goes.
After losing my sanity for a moment and chopping back overgrown iresine back to sticks, then realising, hmm, maybe it was covering that stump for a reason, who cares about the other plants? Nobody ever comes to this garden anyway. Maybe you can garden where nobody else is looking. Oh nah too late now, I've already done it. It will just have to grow back. Like a weed. Everyone will look at the bare soil and wonder where the plant is. But there's other plants around it that can now breathe. It looks better. No it doesn't. It looks worse. Did you see it before I cut it, plus how was I supposed to get those suckers out?
I thought maybe I had gone too far of the edge, and tidied up too much. Like the time I chucked out all my stuff, forgotten I had given some of it to mum, and she was looking for my old junk I had chucked out that she claimed belonged to her. I never heard the end of it.
The thing is when my boss says 'tidy' its like I cannot hear the word. He says tidy the roses and maybe hibiscus. So I go, look at the roses and see they need pruning and cutting back. Ok so I start doing this, after all he said roses and maybe hibiscus. I spend all this time doing this till the roses have all the deadwood and dead flowers cut out and all their stems are growing towards the light. Then I realise well I don't have time, because he has only given me 30 minutes, to hoe and weed around as well. So I stupidly point this out to him, and then he gets mad at me for not doing it. I said, TIDY the roses, not PRUNE them. Didn't you take a hoe with you. Well yes but I didn't have time as I was pruning the roses. You didn't say to WEED around them.
My boss is just about to either top himself or quit the company and leave me to walk home from the North Shore, but maybe I have to remind him he hired a gardener not a tidier-upper. Plus, how can you tidy a junkyard anyway. If its junk, why would tidying it make it any better? It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A futile task. But I suppose everything has to look good while it's sinking.
I just have to adjust to this mindset and realise maybe he doesn't have as long to live as I have.
Nearer my God to thee...
My boss left dead lavender plants that we questioned him can we take these out, but, his reasoning was if we take them out the residents will have nothing to look at. So he left them in for nearly a year and they didn't grow an inch and we were not allowed to touch them. Well, I'm sorry but I think residents would rather look at plants that are alive than dead ones. Maybe there is a gap, but sometimes I think we coddle residents too much and think they don't know that plants if cut back will grow back but plants that are dead as doornail won't. Besides, aren't we meant to trim lavender when its flowered for the flowers. Not wait till they die!
Its like when Myra threw a fit at me and accused me of chucking out her bulbs and cutting dead leaves off her plants. They grew back. It will grow back. Would you leave split ends in your hair never cut your fingernails till they grow all gnarly that you can't do anything except that they are photographed for the Guiness book of records? No I think not. But then I do WAY too much thinking these days. And doing. Which I call 'gardening'. I should just stop and take a nap. Yes. My next job. Actually my dream job. Dreaming.
