While getting my garden ready for my garden tour it occurred to me that weeding out the tyrants in the garden is like dusting in the house. It never ends. Lets say you try to be prudent and decide to work smart--you will do a room a day and then presto! Its done in a week and you can relax. But no----where you started is now dusty again. I have tried the same strategy in the garden---a section at a time: the front beds, the side beds, the wild reaches of the backyard. Come to find out, the...

A gardener never made a rose bloom. As a passionate gardener, I wish I could make all the flowers in my garden bloom when I want them to bloom and how I want them to bloom! But alas, it doesn't work that way. What I CAN do is to tend to the conditions under which a rose will---might---bloom: I enrich the soil with things roses like, I plant the rose bush in a place where it will get lots of sun, I fertilize the rose bush regularly, I spray it to remove bugs, I water it when its thirsty, I...

Recently one of my clients came to see me for help with something she thought she could figure out on her own but decided some help was in order. She told me she was struggling with making herself do something hard, something she had been "dreading," something she thought she should do, but couldn't get herself to do it. I said, "Well, good job, you already have taken the first step by giving yourself permission to ask for help! We are not meant to do hard things alone." "We're not? I feel...