As the book draws to a close, Egan is reflecting on what he has accomplished, especially with the help of some gardening and building professionals. As someone who, admittedly a bit like me, often jumps into household or creative projects with a stronger vision than a plan, I appreciated the following insight.
The best professional work, one slowly realizes, is mostly preparation. The highly visible finishing takes relatively little time, but how it looks is almost entirely the result of the care and quality of the less visible prepatory work that seems to take forever.
How true, how true. It’s taken me a long time to learn this, and I imagine it will take me a bit longer to fully integrate the knowledge into my best practice behaviors. But, I can see how true it is. For cooking and baking. For sewing. And you bet your sweet peas, it’s true for gardening. I think it’s even true for things like retirement planning and even for being a good partner in a relationship. After all, it only takes 15 minutes or less to get married, but if you haven’t laid some solid, high quality groundwork, it’s likely that your union will fall apart.
As an American and as a youth and maybe even (woo woo alert) as an Aries, I’ve been into immediate results and instant gratificiation for a long time. It’s only in the past few years I’ve stepped away from that, slowed down a little, taken in the bigger picture, started laying solid groundwork and stopped just rushing forward. Perhaps this lesson is finally sinking in because of my work and play in the garden.
Years ago, when I was in grad school, I worked with a team of women performing garden installations and maintenance. It was glorious work, and they ladies were awesome. One day, though, we were installing some unusually expensive plants–and a brick ton of them–at a property. The designer, a third party who’d contracted with us, made no room in the budget for soil amendments. We were digging into and tamping down these gorgeous perennials into stinky, soilless muck. Of course, the plants looked beautiful on the surface, but they were going to (worst case scenario) rot before they could come to maturity or (best case scenario) underpeform and be stressed out and never reach their natural potential. “Laying the groundwork” is SO important. Those expensive bags of organic clay buster or the dark, rich compost you spend at least a year making, that’s what makes the difference, short-term and long-term, on the health of your plant material and the quality or beauty of your garden. Same is true for so many things in life.
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