My Seedy Affair

One painfully early morning, I pulled up to a house nearby for a limo pickup and had about ten minutes to admire a relatively small yard with an amazing variety of trees, not to mention the picture window over the garage, filled with huge plants.

When my passenger came out, I complimented her extensive foliage, to which she answered, “I love it, I hate it, I can’t stop doing it. It’s like a war every time I go outside.”

I’d found my soulmate.

She talked about rebuilding the driveway retaining wall by hand using thousands of small, flat rocks and the various poisonous plants she shouldn’t have planted but did anyway. We talked about picking thorns out of our legs with tweezers, being gashed by lovely, if deadly, fauna, and how to best root out poison ivy.

It was a quick and glorious trip to the airport, since I thought I was alone in my compulsion to try and make something out of what is basically a temperate rainforest I’m pretty sure is trying to kill me.

I see your Facebook gardens, when you wake up and say, “Today’s the day I build a garden!” and by the end of the weekend, it looks like a picture out of Better Homes and Gardens, and deep down, I hate it. It exhausts my soul.

After almost thirteen years, my garden looks like a neglected prison build by drunken monkeys.

We lose houses in my neighborhood in three months to ivy and weeds during the summer. There are a whole blocks going back to nature within walking distance. Pioneers were admirable and all, but we’ve discovered all that lovely green foliage is laid over 120 years of household refuse and possibly industrial waste. I could mosaic the front sidewalk and the neighbor’s driveway with all the glass I’ve pulled out of the yard. I can personally attest to the non-biodegradable nature of carpet made in the ’60s. I haven’t even mentioned the wildlife, because the tale of that battle is for another time and involves the consideration of upping my street cred with the hipsters manufacturing my own locally-sourced, organic groundhog sausage. If George Washington did walk through my backyard (and that is, oddly enough, a possibility), you can bet he dropped all his crap back there, too.

And yet, I can’t resist a hopeless challenge.

See the picture above? See the big trees back there? It took five years, but we cleared and fenced it. My husband finally came out to help because he was tired of finding me crying and cursing under a pile of dead forsythia and blackberry vines.

That chipper is my pride and glory, my big gun in the battle against nature.

It also scares the crap out of everyone in the neighborhood.

But not as much as the grim reaper scythe from Kansas…