A blooming spiderwort adds a refreshing hint of beauty to Ritchie's otherwise frustrating landscape.

In May 2000, my dear friend Adam Ritchie moved into his first home. The adorable brick house he settled on had quite an intricate garden, created by the previous owners. There were winding paths, lots of giant shade trees, flower beds in random and haphazard locations, and everywhere, EVERYWHERE, was vegetation.

“I hope Adam can find his inner green thumb,” I remember thinking. “I hope he HAS an inner green thumb.” I say this because, while helping him move, I couldn’t recall seeing one house plant among all the boxes.

In the beginning, life was like a honeymoon, Ritchie recalls.

“At first I had a gardener come every month or so,” he says. “The garden was well-kept but large and with many plants scattered almost randomly throughout. But as time went by, the garden kept growing almost unchecked – I’d occasionally pull some weeds – until it became the jungle that it is today. At this juncture, I’m considering diesel and a fire to solve my garden woes.”

It’s not for laziness, most days anyway, that Ritchie can’t gain control.

When he gave me a tour, I was impressed. The weeds that previously had been armpit high this time of year had been yanked, and he was slowly but surely toiling his way to some sort of garden sanity. However, with the incredible amount of recent rain, it’s going to take some real tenacity and a lot of mulch to stay abreast of those weeds.

“The sheer volume of life is overwhelming, whether it is weed, plant or tree,” Ritchie says. “Almost all the plant life is mature and spreading. All the watering is also a huge headache when the heat of summer is upon us.”

After a consultation, Adam and I concluded that there’s light at the end of the dandelion-engulfed tunnel. First, we decided that a tree trimmer must come in and remove at least the bottom three layers of growth on his mammoth trees. Second, all the kidney bean-shaped flower beds placed in such an obscure way might be better off demolished – after, of course, the perennials have been transplanted to other more maintained and logical spots. Third, ground covers and mulch have to be thrown down judiciously to start controlling the melee of milkweed.

All is not lost; Ritchie still has the will to fight the good fight. Although he admits he would have done some things differently.

“I would have taken some type of remedial gardening class in the beginning, something to help identify the types of plants and what conditions they thrive under,” he says. “Also, I would have installed some form of a sprinkler system.”

He still loves his water garden, with its blooming irises and frogs galore. And that inner green thumb has definitely emerged; his sunroom is a bustle of foliage from houseplants he has nurtured over the past seven years.

The battles have been waged, but the war is far from over.

“Looking at my garden now, if a plant is alive, then its needs are being met,” Ritchie says. “Perhaps that’s a simplistic way of looking at things, but it allows me to get out in the garden and try to tame the jungle for yet another day.”