Warning signs and boundaries

My front flower beds have been overgrown with weeds for some years now. I joke that once the flowers are cut and placed in a vase, you can’t tell how many weeds they grew between. I marvel at people who have neat flower beds and finely kept outdoor spaces. I could even add a neat clean house to the list. My vegetables are about all I can keep up.

But, I do love zinnias, as do deer. So it works out that the zinnias can be planted behind the garden fences.

So today in an attempt to make room for some zinnia plants that are growing spindly in little pots on the kitchen table, I worked in the round kitchen garden a bit more, pulling catnip, tarragon, and oregano. These are the herbs that are dangerous to an orderly garden. They are as insidious as grass, with roots that travel horizontally, everywhere. I actually think that garden centers should mark certain perennial herbs with a warning. “Caution: This plant will take over your garden, if not kept within very deliberate bounds.”

Today, I wondered whether caution signs ever deter anyone from getting involved in something. Today I thought that even when we are warned, about people and even perennials (be careful of the mint) we somehow think that they'll stay within boundaries, even as we don’t keep them.

Boundaries are a curious thing and it seems a lifelong learning about how we can maneuver around and between them. How do we keep healthy boundaries and still allow ourselves and our lives to flow with a certain fluidity?

I don’t know the answer. But yesterday, I pulled the volunteer sunflower plants out from in the eggplant patch. There’s nothing that I will allow to get in the way of a potentially productive eggplant.

People are like that, I guess. No limits in some places and very rigid ones in others.