We all have to indure criticism and continue doing what we believe is important, which someday might enhance other people's lives.
I'm 64 years old and have worked for 40 years to create exactly what I want in my garden. My mother told me 30 years ago to stop working so hard because nobody would appreciate what I was trying to achieve.
In my parent's spare time, they worked 40 hours a week in their garden on their 11 acres of wooded steep hillside outside of the city limits, where they built a huge house. They never needed to buy vegetables or fruit and their house was surrounded by acres of ornamental plants. They couldn't continue this hard work much past 80 years old and they lived into their 90's. The one great pleasure they had during the last 20 years of their lives was watching the multitudes of hummingbirds feeding around the back porch.
I helped them, but never appreciated all that hard work and tried to pinpoint exactly how I would live differently.
Forty years ago I bought a small 60 year old house, single story with only two steps at the entrances, on a quarter acre of nearly flat land, downtown, in the oldest neighborhood in the city with huge old oak trees in the yards and lining the streets, one block from the most expensive historical houses and one block from old low-rent houses. I've lived here for 40 years, and had a job until recently.
My first decade on this property was spent discovering where the topsoil was thin, creating privacy screening and mulch bins, growing a few vegetables and fruit, and enduring several house robberies.
The second decade was spent trying to figure out how to manage the storm water, determining the levels of sunlight, determining where the fungal problems were located, researching which plants might thrive here, and enduring the neighbors stealing my plants ...I can see my plants in the neighbor's yards as I walk down the street.
The third decade was spent designing landscape paths to potentially allow for wheelchair accesss, more plant research and planting.
In the fourth decade I created raised beds, hugelculture, a tiny pond, a hummingbird habitat and did more plant research and planting.
Meanwhile, my neighborhood was gentrified, every old house was remodeled, surrounded with a pristine sodded yard, shrubs pruned like meatballs and a few hydrangeas.
The neighbors never liked my compost bins, tolerance of weeds, absence of lawn and untidy plants. They think my property's appearance is the reason why they cannot sell their property for 6 times what they paid. Each of the houses on my street are now selling for nearly a million dollars, even though as Grandma used to say: "They put a silk purse on a sow's ear".
All the new neighbors are cutting down the remaining large trees in their yards as soon as they move-in and they are trying to persuade the City to cut down the huge oak trees that line both sides of the street. My new next door neighbor who has never attempted to speak to me even though they see me working in the garden every day, hired a tree cutting service to cut limbs off of my enormous old oak that cross over the property line.
The City appreciates my obvious example of collecting and storing rainwater, my lack of hard surfacing and using slopes instead of retaining walls. They also appreciate that I have not changed the original 100 year old house.
The house next door has sold several times, and every new owner wants to encroach on my property with a retaining wall or new pavement on top of their waste line. Every day a house-flipper interupts me while I'm working in the front yard or by mail wanting to buy my property. They are the reason I terminated the land-line phone.
I have a lot of wildlife in my yard: all kinds of insects, bugs, bees, lizards, garter snakes, barred owls, rabbits, opossums and lots of birds waiting to see what I unearth. The chickadees follow me everywhere. The hummingbirds hover in my face. I've created a space in the bustling city that I appreciate and where I can work in the garden until I die, dispite the kunckleheaded neighbors.
