I’m not sure what color my thumb is exactly. I know it’s not green. But when the pansies show up at the local garden center in early April, I have to buy at least one pot, even though I know I’m likely dooming them to a life of struggle. Luckily, they don’t do background checks on gardening skills, so each year I spend many a spring Saturday filling my shopping cart with tiny, fresh plants to transform our yard into a colorful oasis in the pines. It’s been 12 years and I’m still not there yet.
Each May, as we head toward Mother’s Day, the official start of gardening in my mind, I get excited thinking about all the snapdragons, marigolds and petunias I will stick into the dirt. There’s nothing like the feeling of raking up all the pine needles and old mulch to see fresh dirt dotted with the spindly carcasses of last year’s struggling annuals. I pull out the dead stalks, sure in my heart that this year will be better.
I’ve given up growing vegetables, other than a $15 patio cherry tomato plant purchase that I try to sustain each year, which produces maybe 10 cherry tomatoes throughout the summer. (I suspect our dogs may be sampling a few of them when we aren’t looking.) I try not to think about the $2.99 package of cherry tomatoes available at Fry’s almost every time I walk through the produce aisle. Those few cherry tomatoes I pick off the vine on our porch taste better and sweeter.
We are also lucky enough to live by Ken and Meg, who are master gardeners and also take pity on my mediocre gardening skills. Sometimes when I come home from work there’s a handful of fresh-picked lettuce and basil, plus a couple of ripe tomatoes sitting on the front step next to my wilted mid-season pansy plant. We also enjoy summer squash, green beans, rhubarb, blackberries, peaches, apples, pears, and even homemade jam, just because we’re lucky enough to have generous and kind neighbors. I’ll be picking up after our dogs in the back yard and a hand holding some fresh tomatoes will suddenly appear at the top of the wood fence asking me if I’m ready for a few more tomatoes. The answer is always yes. I will never turn down a freshly grown tomato.
Now that May is here, I feel the urge to dig in the dirt and pick sticky pine needles off my clothes and out of my hair again. My 2024 pansy plant is already sitting on the front porch, waiting to be planted. When I got home from work on Wednesday, I looked out over the front yard and was surprised to see two purple irises blooming in the far corner of the yard. This is the first year they’ve bloomed, and I felt a swell of pride that at last they were flowering. As I walked toward the gate, I noticed the peony plant that has struggled the last few years has also popped up and has more stalks than I’ve seen since I planted it several years ago. I was sure it was a goner the first few years, shooting up a couple of stalks and leaves but never making it through the summer, no matter how carefully I tended to it. Maybe it needed to settle in and build some roots before it could grow.
I can see the beauty of what is there already. When we sit on the front porch on a hot summer day this summer, I’ll listen to the pine trees whistling in the breeze, the random knocks of woodpeckers searching for supper, the buzz of hummingbirds fighting for their space on the feeders and watch lizards doing pushups on the sunny cement wall. Even though it may not be the garden I had imagined, nature has given us something more beautiful than I could ever create.