Gardening Disasters: Sibiling Assignment #19

Inland Empire Girl cooked up this assignment. You can find her piece here and SilverValleyGirl's is here.

I'll begin with a confession. My most successful gardening occurred when I wasn't married. With wife number two, we never really gardened, but after she and I divorced, I decided to take it up. When the Deke and I got married, gardening just didn't work for me any more. I really think the way I lean toward autonomy, wanting to be left alone, and a streak of stubbornness makes me very difficult to garden with.

I don't want to follow planting plans. I want to the opposite of what books say to do about where to put things. I try to be different. I always liked the way my yard looked. Things were unbalanced, colors were not coordinated, and I liked putting flowers and herbs and bushes in peculiar places. Once the Deke and her kids moved in, this approach didn't work any more and I lost my interest in gardening. Contracting meningitis also injured my gardening spirit as did the accompanying bouts with depression and fatigue.

When I did garden, I planted daffodils, tulips, lilies and other flowers near the public sidewalk in front of my house. I refused to use a roto-tiller. I shoveled well below the depth needed to plant bulbs and brought the soil from deep in the yard to the the top and put the soil near the top below it.

I loved doing this. It looked like I was digging graves, but the results were magnificent as I worked organic fertilizers and bone meal into that soil from below and my flowers were gorgeous.

The problem was that many people who walked the streets at night also thought they were gorgeous. I mean, maybe it's not much of a disaster, to have flowers stolen, but I grew those flowers to brighten up my yard and to possibly provide passersby some beauty to uplift their spirits.

Neighbors complimented my work again and again. But, each year, I'd lose more and more flowers to flower thieves.

One morning, I was sleeping in the living room because I felt like it. At about six a.m., the phone rang. My next door neighbor told me that two women were out front mowing down my flowers. They didn't have a power mower or anything, but they were cutting everything they could get.

By the time I pulled on some jeans and put on a T-shirt, the women had finished denuding my beds and had moved to my next door neighbor's garden on the other side.

I confronted them. They both had an armful of my flowers.

One of them said, "Oh! I'm so sorry. I didn't know they belonged to anyone. Here. You can have them."

I muttered the Lord's name in vain and few other profanities under my breath and accepted their offering.

I pulled out every vase and glass I needed and put them in water. I kept some in my house. I gave them away to friends I knew enjoyed flowers.

My garden looked like hell.

The women who robbed me wore the tracks of hard life on their faces. I'm sure their plan was to sell the flowers.

In every single case where someone cut my flowers, I knew that if these people had come to my door and asked if they could have some, I would have happily grabbed some scissors and selected flowers for them, or told them to come back when the timing was better.

But, it's not how flower thieves roll.

Friends often suggested that I not plant flowers in the front yard. They reminded me that I had a lot of room in back.

I didn't want flowers in the back. I wanted to drive or walk home and see all the color in the front. I wanted to be welcomed home by my flowers.

But, that was then. I keep thinking that one of these years, I'll go back and start over again and plant flowers again.

I loved bringing them to life and into bloom.