Other than my wedding day, the days my children were born – and now the day the Saints won the Super Bowl -- one of the happiest days of my life was when I bricked in my back yard, gave my lawnmower and Weed Whacker to my painter, and settled in for a lifetime of being a dedicated gentleman gardener.
I did this because I read somewhere that bricks don’t grow. I also hated cutting grass, edging grass, raking grass, and bagging it.
I’ve also always loved flowers. I had a great aunt who worked at Farley’s Florist shop in the old Roosevelt Hotel who spent every spare minute, it seemed, with her hands in her beloved garden working with her flowers.
Every year when spring arrives, as it does this week, I think about her and that life-changing day when I bid my Briggs & Stratton mower adieu, with no regrets. Spring, glorious spring, is upon us, I say to whoever is listening – usually no one. But when you get to my age, you can talk to yourself and no one says much about it.
Spring is the time of flowers and rebirth, and I don’t mean the brass band, although I love those guys, too. And then without thinking what happened, and continues to happen every year, with a song in my heart I hit the road for the nursery where everything is beautiful and green and lush and colorful and I have this wonderfully misguided ability to block out the past – and pull out my credit card and spend lotsa money on new plants.
They don’t keep statisitics on this, but I am certain I have single-handedly helped the economy of local nurseries as much as anyone for almost 40 years.
I look back and it seemed so simple, the idea of having a low-maintenance garden. So I planted beautiful flowers, lots of them. And then I fought constant battles with bugs and fungus, assorted plant diseases, the wrong soil content, over-watering and under-watering, not enough sun and too much sun . . . and despite taking out a second mortgage to buy specially formulated fertilizer and other things like soluble potash – which sounds dreadful -- I lost battles after battles.
But I persisted with dogged, dumb determination, dumb undoubtedly the key word.
For years my favorite flowers were roses, beautiful Peace, Arizona and Tropicana roses. I can recall how in the nursery the buds were bursting, the stems were dark green and red, new shoots were exploding and I said, “How can I miss?”
As it turned out, I missed like me in the batter’s box swinging against Roger Clemens. As gorgeous as they are, roses are a never-ending challenge. Like a lot of relationships, they’re high-maintenance. The first year they looked great – They hadn’t been under my care long enough to fade. The second year was, well, they did bloom. The third year I had successfully created dwarf blooms and the leaves had yellow and brown splotches all over them. The fourth year they were history.
So let’s just say I fought the wars of the roses for years but I finally waved the white flag and moved on to fight other losing garden skirmishes that were not as painful.
When it comes to gardens, one thing I am is indefatigable. I have no quit in me. Some might say I’m a big klutz when it comes to gardening. Hey, they might be right! But when the spring planting season begins, there is no more optimistic klutz gardener in the world.
I’m even a sucker for gardening guides at newsstands. The flowers and gardens look so incredibly beautiful in those magazines, like Southern Living’s “Easy Gardening: 82 Secrets to Backyard Success.” I put that in my basket. I’ll need all 82, rest assured.
One of those tips hit home right away: “Plant flowers with the roots down.” Yikes! And all these years I was . . . just kidding.
Other words I read were somewhat disheartening: “Gardening is fun when you know what you’re doing.” The jury came in with that verdict a long time ago.
Undaunted, I forge on – despite knowing what will eventually happen. Right now, it is beautiful – freshly planted, healthy, in full bloom with many more buds ready to burst open. I sit in my rocker on my front porch and admire my wife’s handiwork – she did the planting this year – I supervised.
I was so tickled with how things looked I awarded myself a “Garden of the Week (Temporarily)” sign. A month would be too much to hope for.
“All great gardens begin with a dream,” I read. My garden, rest assured, may begin with a dream but history tells me it will turn out to be more like a hallucination or an illusion. Instead of the Garden of Eden, it’ll be the Garden of Weedin’ – and for sure I’ll have a bumper crop of those guys – weeds.
But at least something will be healthy.
