Good Morning.
People bring flowers to friends in the hospital and husbands give their wives roses and sometimes vice versa. Almost from the time they can walk, kids draw pictures of daisies and tulips and make carnations out of Kleenex. Every supermarket has a floral department to facilitate the purchase of a bouquet for a party or when one is simply having a crummy day and needs a lift. Flowers do that; they make life better.
They also enhance the exterior of a home. The minute the temperature is above 40 in the spring, people flock to the greenhouses to buy annuals for their patios, porches, and walkways. The more serious gardener grows herbs and has a yard full of perennials. The really serious gardener is a bonafide landscaper, also hauling in ornamental grasses, flowering shrubs, and rocks to be tucked among the plantings. A birdbath, park bench, ornamental gate, and the latest trend in yard beauty - a water feature - add to the setting that is supposed to be enjoyed for several months of the year.
My grandfather started the horticultural department at Cornell in 1915. He traveled all over the world studying rare plants and was president of the American Rose Society. He lived and breathed flowers and passed along his interest to my father who dug around in the dirt with the kind of enthusiasm he usually saved for the Red Sox. There was, however, an apparent gap in his knowledge of greenery: he gave my older son a golf shirt for his birthday one year and the logo was a marijuana plant. When advised of this fact, he smiled and said he thought it was just something tropical that looked nice on the shirt.
My late husband grew cucumbers that required the use of an eight-foot ladder and a set of loppers to pluck his crop from what amounted to a tree. He mixed up his own plant food that caused pots of annuals to explode with color. He used Epsom salts to help tomatoes struggling in poor soil and tended the hostas, bleeding heart, and Cardinal bushes like a nurse in the intensive care unit. My husband wore golf shirts with an alligator logo.
Which brings me to the downside of this treatise. I don't understand people who view a garden as a distraction or even a nuisance. I sold a home many years ago that had a back yard worthy of a magazine spread and the minute the new owners settled in, they ripped everything out because they didn't want the fuss - something that might have involved turning on a hose once in awhile and an hour of weeding now and then. I cried for days when I heard the yard had been turned into a playground without a flower in sight. I recently was approached by someone interested in purchasing my present home but this time the plan was to dig up a front yard full of shrub roses, lamb's ears, irises, day lilies, Russian sage, and peonies older than I am to make way for more parking in front. Here's the deal: Jesus doesn't care about parking because he doesn't own a car. He walks or takes the bus. He also invented flowers.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
ความคิดเห็น