My husband, naturally, takes a rather dim view of my gardening efforts. Perhaps that is because over the last decade I have spent an inordinate amount of money on dead plants. Well, they weren't dead when I bought them, but they must have been defective.
Once I bought a huge collection of plants from a mail order company. The plants arrived in a giant box which I proudly opened to display for Michael. "You spent money on THAT?" he asked incredulously. The box was full of seeds and sticks, nary a leaf in sight.
"You wait," I assured him. "There will be a beautiful garden here by summer." Eagerly I began planting. After about an hour of work, I had a visitor. Michael came out to check my progress and watched suspiciously as I patted the dirt around a dried-up root ball.
"Did you plant them all like that?" he asked.
"Yeah, why?"
"You're planting them upside down." Needless to say, I didn't see a single plant emerge that year.
I ordered three ornamental trees from the same company. Promisingly, they were each about 6 inches high when they arrived, and actually had leaves. I planted them down the border of our property in the front yard, and was delighted to see that they survived the first month in my plant cemetery. Unfortunately, our neighbor (let's call him Gary) decided very helpfully to mow the grass for us one day. I'm not sure whether he was feeling particularly kind-hearted or wanted to spruce the neighborhood up because company was coming, but either way, he mowed right over my little trees.
This spring, my daughter wanted to get in on the action. We bought a few packets of seed from the grocery store and planted them beneath the honey locust tree in our front yard. After a month or so, tiny green seedlings began to sprout in the bed.
"Look, sweetheart! My flowers are growing!" I crowed to my husband. He grunted.
A few weeks passed. Religiously, Abbey and I watered our plants. "Kate, I don't think those are flowers," Michael said one day. "Those are weeds."
"No way. Those are my flowers. I can't remember what kind they are, but I'm sure they're the flowers Abbey and I planted. See? They're all evenly spaced out - perfect!"
"You planted those on purpose? They sure look like weeds."
"Well, they aren't supposed to bloom the first year. Next year they'll be flowers. This year, they're putting down roots, getting established."
The "flowers" are about three feet tall now. They are spindly and flowerless and seem to be multiplying at a prodigious rate, having filled the flowerbed almost entirely. They resemble the beautiful roadside gardens you see around the edges of overpasses on a neglected stretch of highway. But weeds? No way!
Please don't tell my husband.