Portuguese Gardening Advice

Gardening in Portugal is like having a zoo filled with hundreds of botanical free spirits, each one of which needs constant care and feeding. And certainly fences to keep them from getting out and procreating with reckless abandon all over the place.

“You don’t have to wear your garden on your back, Kristin!” my neighbor said to me, laughing as he hauled away an enormous stockpile of debris I had amassed over the previous season with his tractor.

I’m not sure what exactly he meant but I can guess he was suggesting I gentle down my compulsive gardener instincts and just enjoy the bounty around me, weeds and all.

Then again, there are a lot of things you can carry, metaphorically, on your back, gardens being just one of them. So perhaps, using a garden as a metaphor, he was really telling me to just relax and enjoy living in Portugal.