Whether To Write Or Watch The Willows?

Gardening and writing a blog about gardening is both an oxymoron and a Catch-22. If you want to write all the stories, “adventures”, observations and simple tid bits that occur on a nearly daily basis in your garden…you have to leave the garden to do it. By the time you get inside, wash off your dirty self and begin the mind-numbing task of “What the heck am I supposed to make for dinner?” at 4:30 in the afternoon…you’ve not only lost the energy and desire, you’ve also lost the moment, so to speak. All those lovely, erudite, descriptive word pictures that flowed through your brain so easily hours earlier when you were knee deep in mulch and pulling weeds are now as vanquished as those weeds. Well, the weeds will probably persevere longer than your forgotten prose.

There’s no way I could recount all the blips of ideas, whole paragraphs and outlines of posts and mini-stories that came upon me in such an overwhelming creative rush while I was wheeling my wheelbarrow or washing the birdbaths or lugging watering cans from the rainbarrel. So, what happens? What has happened lo these past couple of months since my last entry? Those brilliantly woven words just ripe for typing, fizzled or they were saved, stored and filed away to be blogged at a later date. I’d reassure myself they’d be written down the next day or the day after because, as Scarlett O’Hara reassured herself, “Ta’marra is anutha daya!!”

Well, ta’marra and ta’marra became yestuhdaya and the day bafoe yestudaya and morphed into weeks. Oh, Fiddle-Dee-Dee. By then, it was ‘old news’. I mean who wants to read about some start up suggestions for beginning another new gardening season. Like, setting the “bones” of the garden right before moving any perennials or adding new ones. “Bones” being stepping stones and pathways. Or do you just galumph your garden clogs into your beds risking squishing and compacting of soil around nearby plants…do you!!??

Then there’s the spotting of volunteers and plotting their R&R. That’d be Rescue and Replacing as opposed to Rest and Relaxation which – hahahaha – neither gardener nor garden resident does in these ‘chere parts, pahd-ner. Like these serendipitous voluntary petunias of purple shades, salvia farinacea , balsams, celosia and ooops, where’d that zinnia come from? All surrounding one of my ancient clumps of coreopsis "Zagreb" that's just low enough to permit the peaking coral heads of a new (albeit temporary) resident, a non-hardy-in-my-zone-but-happy-as-a-clam-in-Florida tropical hibiscus.

Of course there were the usual suspect, ubiquitous thoughts and ideas about new introductions this year. Did I get any? Would I? Would I pay full price and will the woodchuck like them as much as I do? Do pigs fly?

So, I’ve decided to enter this truncated posting as my mea culpa for not being magnanimous enough to take the time to share my voluminous gardening expertise with my vast, vast, vast audience of readers. Did I already ask if pigs flew?

Unlike po lil ole Missy Scarlet who lamented to Rhett, “But, what’ll ah do?”, like Rhett, frankly, I don’t give a damn either because I know I’ll be more diligent in yanking my lil ole Yankee butt inside a few moments earlier to put down on screen all or some of those thoughts that wafted past the buddleias, over the hedge of white mediland roses and around the corner of the billowing willow and settled – kaplonk – in my fertile, compost-amended brain. Fiddle-Dee-Dee, indeed!