How Does Your Garden Grow?
My neighbor is a genius gardener. Plants on her back deck flourish with fragrant, colorful blooms. The patch of land between our two condos is awash with flowers and herbs and honeybees. Her basil plant loves its over-sized pot. Ditto the myriad other green things growing in the ground...in pots...from hanging baskets all around. I often see her puttering around—tending, trimming, watering, and praising all of these growing, thriving, happy plants. It is a happy thing to behold—this woman and her beautiful gardens.
And then there is my deck—and my patch of land between our two condos.
For the most part, I have given up on regular flowers on the back deck. Pansies, petunias, peonies, lilac— all are goners when potted and placed on my deck. They are scorched by the sun and fail to thrive with my haphazard attempts to keep them alive. I’ve now turned to succulents, which hang on despite my alternating under and over watering techniques.
And that patch of land in the front that I mentioned? Compared to my neighbor’s place, it’s not much more than a bunch of struggling, straggling, unnamed plants. Everything looks overgrown—or in the process of dying. The daisies have burst from their bounds to flop onto the sidewalk. The ground cover creeps out and out, trying (I think) to escape my bit of dirt for the obviously preferable land on my neighbor’s side of the walk. Flowers that bravely bloomed in the spring have now sunk into a stagnant state. The only things that thrive are the weeds.
I want to be a good gardener. Somehow (and secretly), I believe achieving that status also would make me a good neighbor. Every spring I imagine myself with garden gloves and a spade or trowel—wielding a watering hose as I call out greetings to all of the neighbors. Perhaps we will swap gardening tips or even clumps of dirt with extra plants sprouting out and waiting to be plopped back into the ground in my corner of the world. I close my eyes and picture myself standing on my deck and surrounded by blossoming, happy, colorful flowers. In this particular vision, bees and hummingbirds flit from place to place, cavorting in the jungle-like atmosphere I have brought to fruition.
Alas, those fantasies are long gone by the time high summer hits. As heat and humidity build, my ambitions drain away. Instead of tending the plants, I stay inside where it is cool and I can write about gardens. Gardening. Gardeners. On paper, anything is possible.
