I garden. Yes.

You garden. Yes.

He gardens. Yes.

She gardens. Yes.

But, “We garden?”

In our household, not so much.

My wife and I both like to grow vegetables. Maryellen also delights in growing herbs and flowers. I stick with munchable stuff.

We got married fairly late in life, 13 years ago. Before that, both of us had been the ones to primarily manage gardens at our previous homes.

So when we married, we tried the “We garden” approach.

Did not work.

Both of us are Type A personalities with inclinations toward being the boss. We each claim to be a better gardener than our spouse is.

This has roots that go way deeper than carrots.

Maryellen delights in remembering how she learned to plant and care for gardens by watching her grandfather and father, who gave each of his children a tiny plot of their own in which to grow whatever they wanted.

I delight in remembering how I learned to plant and care for gardens by helping my grandfather, who was crippled in his old age by serious spinal injuries suffered when he had been an underground coal miner.

Contrary to the stereotype that all people of Italian ancestry are good about gardening, my parents were not. They planted a few rows of tomatoes, pole beans, etc. But both parents worked at factory jobs, leaving them tired enough to be indifferent as to whether the weeds or the veggies won the grow-up races.

So it was Grandpa who taught me much of what I came to love when, as a young adult, I planted gardens.

Maryellen, too, came to love gardening.

We married. We started a small kitchen garden.

We fought.

Of course, it should go without saying that I am a much better gardener than she is. But it does not go that way. She believed in crowding as many plants into as little space as possible. I favored wide rows, regular spacing, etc.

I used pesticides and artificial fertilizers. She thinks both are “fuggetaboutit!”

So we fought.

What had been a pleasant hobby for each of us became, in the early years of our marriage, a perennial contest of wills, a push for power, a stubborn insistence that our honestly held principles of planting, watering, etc., were the only acceptable principles.

That got to be ridiculous.

So we evolved.

To my delight, Maryellen began to see the advantages of having a larger garden with more spaced-out plants. She kept the 10×10 foot kitchen garden as her own, largely unplowed, not fertilized or pesticide-policed.

We agreed to start a larger 20×20 foot plot nearby, also without pesticides, nor artificially fertilized. It gradually grew to its current 40×40 foot size, thanks to our brother-in-law Joe and his massive John Deere tractor.

Each year, I grow more accepting of her choices of plants and placement of rows. Each year, she gets more gracious in going along with my methods of cultivation. I use our small gasoline-powered front-tine tiller between rows. She uses a shovel, a hoe and old-fashioned hand pulling to get the weeds away from places too close to the plants for the tiller to do its thing.

We still disagree, of course. Sometimes, we disagree loudly.

That is on me. I am a loud person by nature. When I am shoved, I push back.

So on occasion, the dogs abandon their watch-the-humans lolling and retreat to the vicinity of the barn while we settle a dispute.

But last week, near 8 p.m. of a sunny summer evening, we both paused as we concluded an hour or so of working separately together.

“The garden looks good,” she said.

“Yes, it does,” I said.

And we smiled at each other.

We just might have learned the “We garden” thing. The secret is not to strive for equality. That is impractical in the first place. Maryellen does most of the cooking, canning and freezing for wintertime use, so it is silly for me to decide on the number of squash plants or bush beans.

I have more upper body strength and an affection for growly, gnarly gas-powered tools, from chain saws to snow blowers, so it makes more sense for me to maneuver the tiller, pound the tomato stakes, etc.

She is better than I am at placing our lawn sweepings in mulching rows, to be plowed under in the fall. I am better at doing that plowing.

So “We garden.”

That, we find, is a metaphor for marital coexistence. Respect each other’s strengths, find common ground and, above all, keep a sense of humor.

That is why Maryellen laughs in hearty agreement whenever I reassert my claim to being the better gardener.

Sure she does.

Sure.

ı ı ı

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net