Therapeutic Gardening

I've frequently said out here that I blog because it's cheaper than therapy.  The same could be said for gardening.  When my life is stressful and I need to "get away," I frequently take to weeding the garden (or the lawn).  I find it very calming for my spirit :-)

Thankfully, my garden is full of weeds, so I will have lots and lots of opportunities to de-stress outside this spring and summer!  I'm not sure where this feeling of gardening as therapy came from, but I was talking to my sister this past weekend and she said the same thing.  Maybe our parents caused this by all the weeding we had to do as children :-)

The other day, a particularly stress-filled day, I was out in my perennial garden weeding.  I have one plant that has a LOT of grass growing in it.  My goal was to get all the grass out of the plant that day.  As I was pulling the weeds, some of them came out by the roots (good), but some of them broke off and the roots remained in the ground (bad).  It occurred to me that it is like that with the weeds in our family and the weeds in my own life.  Sometimes we get the weed pulled out all the way down at the roots and it is gone...for good, and sometimes it just breaks off with the roots still planted, only to grow back in a short amount of time.

The other thing that happened, when I was not being careful about my weeding, is that sometimes I would pull out some of my healthy plant along with the weed.  This happens too in real life, doesn't it?  We aren't careful about our approach to the "weeds" in our children's lives and we do more harm than good in our poor attempt to help them.

I do know that the longer the weeds were allowed to grow in my plant, the harder they were to remove, sometimes intertwining with the roots of the real plant.

I do know that my plant will be happier and grow better without all those weeds in it.  (Yes, my plant can be happy if I want it to be!)