Gardening

I love to garden. No . . . that’s a lie. My mother raised me to believe lying is wrong and that was a whopper, so let me amend it. I enjoy looking at and possessing the results of hours of backbreaking toil, sweaty upkeep, and paying exorbitant water bills that go hand-in-hand with gardening in Callifornia during the summer.

Let’s be honest, I’ll bet this would be the truth for most of us. We all want the yard that says, “An industrious lover of beauty with a flair for achieving goals lives here. Behold the perfection in breathless awe, all those who venture by.” Okay, maybe a little over the top, but this is wishing and wishing should be a boundary-free zone.

I love this valley, but after one hour of futile jabbing at the dirt in my yard trying to hack out a hole deep enough to plant just one of the small petunias plants from a six pack at the hardware store, I am ready to use explosives as a digging tool. There was a reason the early settlers used adobe bricks as building blocks for the edifices they wanted to endure. The same reason that those buildings, like the Mission, can still be seen and used. The ground around here rivals Superman for indestructibility.

The dirt can be softened up—a good soaking for a day before planned planting and it becomes vulnerable to the efforts of the average human. Unfortunately, the average human does not have the resources to pay for the extra water that course would call for from SMID. Our town made the national news for having some of the highest water rates in the nation. I guess it’s nice to be known for something, although, personally, I thought the gas prices were enough.

My neighbor and I are gardening buddies, meaning we both have the same enthusiasm, or lack thereof, for this hobby. At least, we have the same opinion about what does and does not belong in our patches. We don’t grow anything useful, or edible. Don’t get us wrong, eating is one of our favorite things, and we haven’t got anything against plants that serve medicinal uses, but if one of these productive plants dies it causes some regret. We aren’t big on feeling bad, consequently we seek out and cultivate only hardy plants whose loss is purely decorative. Hence the list of plants we would recommend for cultivation fit our own criteria; they grow well in dirt that rivals cement for porosity, they can live through a quite unintentional skip of a day or three in the watering cycle, they reappear as if by magic each year with no effort on our parts, pests do not find them particularly delectable, and they produce lots of color.

All this has left us with a short list of cellulose-based photosynthetic favs, all of which exist in abundance in my yard, Geraniums, Petunias (preferably ruffled), Dahlias, and Iris. Because of the traits of these plants I have a sneaking suspicion that if we could access them these plants would have serious personality problems, rendering them outcast and unpopular among their own kind. I have a theory that the other plants think these guys are sell-outs, blooming for the human overseers without demanding the sweat equity they deserve as members of the vegetable kingdom. But, that’s just a theory.

All I know for sure is that I love the colors and scents that a little Miracle Grow and H2O, lots of sweat and time, and luck—a big dose of luck—can produce. Even in this dirt.