By Jamie Brown, for NAS

I used to think the cleanest relationships were the professional ones. You pay, they do the work, everyone stays politely on their side of the fence. No feelings. No awkwardness. No lingering guilt.

This theory collapsed slowly, like a retaining wall built from good intentions and bad planning, the day I realized I could not fire my gardener without feeling as if I were abandoning a relative at a bus station.

His name is Miguel. Or maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter anymore, because at some point names give way to roles, and roles give way to something closer to kinship. He arrived years ago with a mower that coughed more than it purred, a hat that had lived several lives before meeting me, and a habit of greeting the garden itself before he greeted the house. He didn’t rush. He touched the rosemary as if it were a living thing. He talked to the soil. He nodded at the trees. I watched this from the window and thought, ah, that’s nice. A little theatrical, maybe, but nice.

I hired him because he was affordable. I kept him because he was careful. I bonded with him because he seemed to care about my garden in a way that suggested he believed it had feelings, memories, and perhaps even grudges.

This was my first mistake.

You can’t let someone care about your garden more than you do. That’s how they get you.

At first it was practical. He showed up. He worked hard. He didn’t nickel-and-dime me. He fixed small things without mentioning them. He remembered which plants were new, which were fragile, which were recovering from trauma inflicted by my own enthusiastic but ill-informed pruning. He noticed things.

Then it became personal. He asked how I was. Not in the casual, transactional way, but in a way that implied he was prepared to hear the answer. He remembered details. He asked about the weather last week, not because it affected the grass, but because it affected me. He told me about his kids, his back, the way certain plants reminded him of places he’d lived before. He spoke about the garden as if it were a shared project, something we were raising together.

That’s when I should have stopped him. That’s when I should have said, Miguel, please don’t love this place. Please don’t love me. I am not emotionally prepared for this arrangement.

But I didn’t. I nodded. I listened. I accepted.

Years passed. The garden flourished. It matured. It became one of those gardens that looks like it knows what it’s doing, even though most of that wisdom belongs to someone else. Visitors complimented it. I accepted praise I had not earned. Miguel smiled in the background, pleased but discreet, like a ghostwriter watching his book win awards.

And then the spreadsheet arrived.

It always does.

Somewhere between rising costs, responsible adulthood, and the quiet panic of realizing that every monthly expense adds up to a life, I decided I needed to save money. Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just sensibly.

And that’s when I saw the line item.

Gardening.

It sat there innocently, as if it hadn’t been feeding an entire emotional ecosystem for years. As if it were just another service, like internet or trash pickup. As if the man attached to it didn’t know the names of my plants, my moods, and the precise angle at which the afternoon light hits the lemon tree.

I considered alternatives. Doing it myself. Hiring a company. Reducing visits. Seasonal pauses. I ran scenarios like a general planning a retreat. Every option ended the same way: Miguel standing there, nodding politely, absorbing the news in a way that would haunt me for decades.

The problem with having a very good relationship with a service person is that it stops being a service. It becomes a story. A shared narrative. And stories are harder to cancel than subscriptions.

How do you tell someone, you’ve been wonderful, truly irreplaceable, but I’ve decided to replace you anyway? How do you say, I value you deeply, just not at forty dollars a visit? How do you explain that the economy has turned your affection into a liability?

You can’t say, I’ve had enough of you, because you haven’t. You can’t say, it’s not personal, because it is. You can’t say, we’re cutting back, because what you’re really cutting is a relationship that never officially existed but feels very real.

I imagined the conversation endlessly. I practiced sentences in the shower. None of them survived contact with reality.

I pictured him carrying this news with him, telling his wife, telling his plants, telling the soil somewhere else that this place no longer needed him. I imagined the garden missing him. The rosemary sulking. The trees growing resentful. I imagined myself five years later, still thinking about it, still wondering if I could have afforded to keep him if I’d just skipped fewer coffees.

There is an irony in hiring a professional and then discovering, years later, that what you’ve actually done is adopt a family member. And like many family members, he did not ask for this. I did.

We tell ourselves that professional boundaries protect us. They don’t. They just delay the moment when we realize we’ve let someone into our lives through the side gate instead of the front door.

Eventually, I did what all cowards do. I delayed. I reduced visits. I mumbled about schedules. I pretended things were temporary. Miguel understood more than he said. He always had. That, too, was part of the problem.

The garden still looks good. It always will, because it was built on years of care. But sometimes I stand there and feel the absence. Not just of a gardener, but of a quiet presence that knew how things should be. A man who treated the land as if it were listening.

Saving money is sensible. It is necessary. It is adult. But there are costs that don’t show up in spreadsheets. There are savings that feel like losses for years afterward.

If I ever hire another gardener, I will be polite. Distant. Efficient. I will not let him talk to the rosemary. I will not learn his children’s names. I will not allow the relationship to grow roots.

But I know myself.

And I know gardens.

So I suspect I’ll make the same mistake again.