My Garden
A garden is a wonderful thing. It can be a beautiful addition to an otherwise humdrum backyard, it can be a home to wildlife, and in fact, I have heard that you can grow real, edible food in a garden. But you can’t believe everything you hear. I, however, am sadly lacking in any sort of gardening skill. The sheer scope of my inability to garden is breathtaking.
To begin with, I don’t know what to put in my garden. I don’t want to introduce a plant that HAZMAT teams have to come out and destroy because it’s a pernicious, non-native, invasive, man-eating tulip, or something. And I don’t want shrubbery with extremely complicated care instructions. For instance, I will not buy anything with a tag that reads:
“Plant in partial shade, facing northeast, next to something woody, in an area that will achieve a temperature of 293.15 degrees Kelvin, but only on Wednesdays, and water every 17 hours with glacial spring water heated to 40.76 degrees Celsius. Prune with 6-inch red-handled garden shears from Sears when first arachnids appear, or when the weather turns frosty, whichever happens first.”
I thought the best way to begin my personal flora collection would be to visit the nursery. I went to “Bob’s Flower and Other Green Things Emporium and Lawn Mower Repair Shop” and was confronted with a dizzying array of plants, all sizes and shapes, with names like “hypericum” and “archontophoenix”. Having failed to keep current on my Latin, I had no clue what those were. And my budget constraints forced me to buy only baby plants, so they all looked pretty much like little sticks in pots. Figuring Bob wouldn’t sell it if it weren’t a good plant, I took home some things named “turpiculus” and a couple of “foetidus” for good measure. Later, after I had looked those up in my Latin dictionary, I prayed they wouldn’t survive.
Then I heard about bulbs. They are ugly little things that you hide in your garage for part of the year. During planting season, you bury them in the ground, and they turn into beautiful flowers. (Sadly, this does not work with other ugly things.) So, I bought bulbs and planted them, and sure enough they grew. Of course, it had been so long since I planted them that I had no idea what they were and pulled a few up, thinking they were weeds, before I realized what was going on. Once they all bloomed they were beautiful, but I had thrown away the packages they came in, so I didn’t know what they were. I just called them all bulb-flowers.
I enjoyed my bulb-flowers tremendously but I wanted more. I opened a gardening book and learned about something called ‘zones.’
“Aha!” I thought. “This will tell me what to plant, and where!” But although I combed through the book (well, just the table of contents and the index) I could not find zones describing my planting area. What would do well in the “dusty slope that gets no water or sun because some big tree is in the way” zone? How about the “rocks and weeds on the side of the house that used to be a dog run” zone? And don’t forget the “tetherball area surrounded by what I think might be ferns” zone. Obviously, the gardening book is only helpful to gardeners. I went back to trial and error.
I bought a box of seeds that was guaranteed to produce lovely wildflowers. (If they’re from a box, aren’t they actually domesticated flowers?) Shortly after scattering the seeds around in my “garden”, I read a newspaper article about wildflower mixes that said that some of these might contain weeds along with the flowers. (The invasive, non-native, pernicious kind, of course.) Even worse, some flowers are welcomed in some zones, but considered to be weeds in others. Oops!
A year or so later, I saw beautiful flowers blooming in a part of my yard where I thought I’d planted only bulbs. I asked my gardener friend which bulbs were responsible for these particular flowers. She looked at me with pity and gently informed me that these were not from bulbs. I can only assume that the domesticated wildflowers beat out the pernicious weeds in that particular box.
Although all the potted plants did die (thank goodness), the bulbs and mystery flowers continue to brighten up my yard. My next project is to find out what kind of grass can stand up to snow sledding in winter and downhill cardboard sledding in summer, with a dose of neglect thrown in for good measure. Back to Bob’s for some pernicious grass!
