All my adult life, I've thought I should enjoy gardening. I'm pretty creative, I love color, I like flowers, so I should like to garden, right? Wrong. I like looking at gardens, and reading books about gardening, but the thing that most real gardeners love, the digging and communing with nature and dirt under the fingernails . . . well, I hate all those things. Especially the dirty fingernails. I really can't stand that.
Nevertheless, every year I pore over the White Flower Farmcatalog, trying to convince myself that this is the year that I will embrace gardening. I consider the possibilities: an all-white garden that would come alive at dusk, an all-white fragrance garden (Casablanca lilies, anyone?), where I would sit in the evenings, sipping Chardonnay, and enjoying the fruits of my horticultural labors.
Invariably, exhausted by the amount of work it takes to decide on plants, let alone order them and plant them, I drive down to the supermarket and buy some impatiens, which flourish until about July and then turn all scraggly and sad.
But this year, I branched out. Instead of the supermarket, i went to a garden center, where I bought some yellow-flowered daisy-like plants, some purple catmint, and some pink petunias. Planted in my window boxes, they looked fabulous, as though someone had taken the time to choose complementary colors and heights and shapes. It was a riot of lovely color -- until the petunias took over. It turns out that these were no ordinary petunias, they were something called supertunias, guaranteed to outperform everything else in the garden.
Do you see the little speck of purple in this photograph? That's all that's left of the non-petunia inhabitants of the window box. Now the petunias are climbing up the side of the house, in the general directions of my son's room. Should I worry? Remember Audrey II?
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