January perks up every year with the Renegade Gardener--a man who also installed the landscaping / gardens around my mom's new home in Minnesota. I'm still getting over losing my childhood home, but the new house sure is nice, too. I guess.
Anywho, check out Don's High Spot / Black Spot awards. If you like sarcasm and brutal ecological truth, you'll like Don. By extension, you may like me, too. There are always many literary gems with Don's awards, but I chose this more subtle one:
"Much of the joy in gardening comes from gaining expertise in growing a wide and disparate collection of plants the presence of which you enjoy. From its infancy in your garden, each plant exhibits different behaviors hinting at different needs, much like children. These differences range from subtle to stark. As parent, your job is to discover and adapt your skills at nurturing based on these differences.
This development of skills is usually fun, occasionally frustrating. You will grow some plants that help with the dishes, do their homework without prompting, and are eager to attend Sunday school. Other plants arrive home after curfew in the back of a patrol car. That the easy plants are often plain and the bad boys always gorgeous reflects a universal principle often adapted to literature and film."
And yes, Don, why do chewing gum packages now look like condom packages? Is the next step for seed packs to emulate this marketing strategy? I think it'd work.
5 comments:
You were too kind to put in the - if you want a low maintenance garden, Go. Play. Bowls.
The beginning:-
think, when we are little, 'my home', 'our garden', conveys the same sense of ownership as we feel about our parents. Realising that that original house isn't a permanent, inseparable part of our family, along with the humans in it, is part of the uncomfortable passage of growing up and can leave an indelible longing, not for return, but for our old home to catch up with our histories.(At least - I think!)
Lucy
I developed a little horticultural crush on the Renegade Gardener when I first read his "Enough with the Damn Daylilies" post. :)
D--Huh?
Lucy--Shoot, my parents moved when I was about 29 I think it was. The nostalgia won't go away because that old house is at the center of my memoir.
Kim--You, he does get pedicures. That might make him a catch.
Thanks for the reminder...I have forgotten to read that site for the longest time!
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