Over the two decades I’ve battled Mother Nature to reclaim my wooded and marshy yard, landscaping it into something habitable, I’ve learned a lot of life lessons. Lesson number one: Mama Nature fights back, she fights hard and she fights to win. While I have only a few short years left on this great, green Earth, she has eons to play with.

That’s the joy of it – stopping and looking closely, very closely – that’s when everyday things appear suddenly in new and fresh ways. Kristen Price photo

It’s like she’s adopted Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy. She lets me (the dope) try to pound her into submission, planning and clearing and planting and weeding, until I’m so tired I can no longer defend myself, and then she cold caulks me with a single punch.

After we renovated our 300-year-old house, I became obsessed with renovating our woodsy, weedy yard. I had a vision, and I was obsessed. I had lived in Japan for one year, and during that time abroad I fell in love with Asian-style gardens, especially the stone-centric gardens of Japan. And to my delight, I was blessed with a yard full of rocks, of every imaginable size and shape.

Of course, I made every mistake common to novice landscapers: I planted too much; I planted too close; I planted the right plants in the wrong places and the wrong plants in the right places. A decade later, I realized I had created a backyard jungle. It was then I had what should have been an earlier revelation: I spent 10 years joyously (and blindly) creating this artificial paradise, and now I had to nurture and maintain it. And that took time; lots and lots of time.

A huge part of my yard-care challenge is the leaf-laden, 100-year-old old oak trees, plus the wild ferns, Japanese barberry, and Asiatic bittersweet, all three incredibly invasive. Literally two months every spring – April and May – I rake oak leaves for two hours a day, five days a week. And if it’s a bad acorn season … well, don’t get me started. I love ferns but let one sneak into your garden and by next year your yard looks like a scene from “Jurassic Park.” The barberry and bittersweet pop up everywhere like angry dandelions in May. I spent the second decade of my landscaping career clearing out and cleaning up.

Kristen Price photo

One aspect of the yard I don’t obsess about is my lawn. I’m not a Lawn Nazi, like my dad was. He lived in a suburban part of his town and carried a fingernail clipper in his hip pocket to trim any stray blades the lawnmower missed. I subscribe to the “Liberty Lawn” concept, conceived by a good friend: Anything that’s green is at liberty to grow there.

This all sounds like a crabby old man’s rant, but in truth I love my yard and its gardens. I have no artistic talent to speak of, except a decent eye for composition, but in my gardens I can be a painter and a sculptor and a conceptual artist. My yard is my palette, my uncut stone, my empty room.

When guests visit and take the “garden tour” I get lots of compliments. That’s nice, but for me my gardens are best appreciated alone, in the evenings, after a day’s hard labor, when the sun has dropped behind the scrim of trees, the light softens, and I have a glass of cold Sauvignon Blanc in hand. It’s quieter now, save the bird calls and the spring peepers. At this precise moment the garden takes on a Zenlike quality. Introspective. Peaceful. Serene.

As in all Japanese gardens, the greatest pleasures are derived from observing the small things, the ordinary things: a fat bead of dew rolling slowly off the giant leaf of a Blue Hosta like a crystal-clear slug, or a tree swallow flitting lightning fast through the cattails, effortlessly catching mosquitoes. That’s the joy of it – stopping and looking closely, very closely – that’s when everyday things appear suddenly in new and fresh ways.

In the long run, I will lose my personal paradise to Mother Nature’s relentless reclamation project, but over the shorter term, the time in which I now plant, pot and plow, I will have rejoined my sanity, regained my serenity, and rediscovered my soul.

Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.