We moved into a new house recently, and as luck would have it, the previous owners left us a stunning garden: roses, geraniums, tulips, carnations, peonies, tiger lilies, camellias, bleeding hearts, giant flowering onions, bearded irises, dogwoods, crepe myrtles, elephant ears, even great pumpkins — lushness and light wrap the house in a verdant embrace.

Oh, you should see it! It’s a carnival of creation, a festival of flora, a cornucopia of color! It’s … it’s … it’s … aw heck, who am I kidding? It’s a huge pain in the neck.

Because any garden of significant size requires mulch. And as the old saying goes: Mo’ mulch, Mo’ problems. Specifically, weeds. Lots of ‘em.

When we first moved in, I hired a landscaper to cull the wildly overgrown flower beds, but in an ill-conceived gambit to save money, declined his recommendation to smother everything with a fresh coat of mulch. He looked at me — OK buddy, it’s your funeral — and drove away. And as he did, I swear to you, I saw the weeds starting to poke back up out of the earth.

But since I’d already paid once, on principle I couldn’t pay again. When the weeds came back stronger than ever it fell to me, the man of the house, the master of my domain, to borrow my wife’s gardening gloves and tame the advancing wilderness. No one’s said this yet, so I’ll say it: I was basically Lewis and Clark out there.

You see, my weeds aren’t the kind that you pull up effortlessly by the fistful. In one flower bed we have sea grass, each individual blade connected to an underground network of knotty, interlocking tubes plunked deeply, stubbornly in the earth’s soil; in the other we have various creepers and vines that look like they were imported from the jungles of Sumatra.

After four hours of yanking undesirable plants from the ground — sun beating, sweat dripping, gnats congregating — I found myself triumphantly, madly holding a dangling network of tubular roots in the air like a human skull after a Viking conquest. The jungle. It … changes you.

I don’t want you to lose your humanity like I did, so I’ve created a short “how to” list for weeding.

1) Go outside and assess the situation.

2) Go inside and call your father-in-law. It’s important to bond in nature.

3) Throw on long pants, a hat and your lawnmower shoes. If these are an old pair of running shoes, they’re too new. Ideally, they should be your gym shoes from 12th grade.

4) Once you get started, never, ever go inside for a “quick break.” A/C is the weeder’s kryptonite. If you go inside, you’re never coming back out.

5) Congratulations, you did it! Kick back, have an ice-cold beverage, and pat yourself on the back. Mission accomplished.

6) Tomorrow, walk outside and observe that the weeds are growing back.

7) Purchase a hazmat suit and a 40-gallon barrel of RoundUp. Burn it all down.

Here I will begrudgingly admit that weeding has given me some hard-earned perspective.

It’s a thorny reminder that we can never get to the end of our to-do lists — there’s no permanent victory on life’s chore treadmill. So by all means, let’s chip away, but sometimes we do, in fact, just need to step back into the A/C and let the weeds grow.

Also, funny thing happened. Since welcoming twin babies under our roof, who have joined a kindergartner and second-grader, I now look forward to weeding. The fresh air is exhilarating, the weeds and mosquitoes a reminder of the vast and wondrous spectrum of God’s creation. My nightmare has become my refuge. It’s so quiet out there

As we turn the page to autumn, a sweet respite from weeding beckons. But know this, dear weeder: In gardens as in life, the jungle always grows back.

Zach Przystup (zprzystup@gmail.com) works for the Fulbright Program at the U.S. Department of State.