My Neon Green Thumb

Disclaimer: This is NOT my garden!

I enjoy gardens. They are part of the appeal of summer. I like to see the bright colors and the smells that waft up as you are walking by. There are some beautiful gardens in our neighborhood. I like to walk my dog by them so I can enjoy their calm beauty.

You would think that this love of gardens means that I want to have a garden of my own. You would be wrong in your thinking. I have no desire to work in our yard to make something beautiful and rare grow. In fact, I do minimal work on our garden and lawn. It often doesn't get more than a mow every couple of weeks.

In part, this is because I'm lazy (when it comes to gardening). I have other things I would rather spend my energy doing than crawling around on my hands and knees, trying to get the gladiolas (or whatever) to grow. I just don't enjoy the work, and I don't think I would ever appreciate my garden as much as I appreciate other people's gardens.

Our house has no front yard. We live in a duplex, so there are two driveways that lead into tuck-under garages. That only leaves a little strip of grass between the two driveways. We've just left it grass. We have a small backyard with a little garden off to the side. There are also some terraces that lead up into the alley. It's possible that we could plant something there. However, when we moved in, there was a large tree growing out of the terrace. Eventually, it leaned too far over the house (and power lines), so it was removed. Now we can easily see eight stumps that we can't remove without completely redoing the terraces.

The first year we lived in the house, we bought a can of wildflower mix and sprinkled it over everything. Basically, we were encouraging pretty weeds to grow in our back yard. A couple years ago, we splurged and bought about 30 lilies that we put in the flower bed at the edge of our yard.

What makes this a little more uncomfortable is that our neighbor LOVES gardening. She has an immaculate yard with beautiful flowers growing all over the place. Most weekends in the summer, we can find her moving the hostas from the back of the flower bed to the front, and then back again. Needless to say, our "natural approach" didn't appeal to her too much. She tolerates it until the weeds begin encroaching on her side of the fence we share. She was elated when we planted the lilies, but she noticed that we didn't weed them as often as we should. That's when she decided to start coming into our backyard to weed the lilies. Yes, we now have a free gardener.

Another source of difficulty is that one of the stumps began growing again last summer. At first there were a couple little shoots. Then it began to look like a bush. This year, we got another tree, which was also leaning over the house and power lines. We decided that we needed to do something about it. So we came out with our little saw to cut all the branches off, but leaving three viable trees.

When our neighbor saw it, she expressed such joy that we were cleaning up our back yard. I should also explain that our neighbor is more passive-aggressive than friendly, so we tend to ignore her. As she gushed over the removal of the bush we learned that she was also attempting to trim it on her own. However, I don't think we made her very happy with the remains of the tree. We decided that this would make great firewood to burn in a fire pit. We stacked the stumps and branches back on the terrace for future use. Yup, we cut down the tree and put the dead remains back where the living tree was. That's how classy we are!

I don't ever think we will be big gardening people. I dream about having a nice garden, but I know that I don't want to put the energy into it. Instead, I derive my joy from someone else's joy of gardening. I see it has a win-win!