The Start of Something Wonderful

My husband Rob and I are new at a lot of things. We’re new homeowners for one - we bought our home almost 2 months ago. Before this, we lived in a condo, and there are so many things to learn about owning a house. The biggest change is having a yard and all the joy and hard work that goes with it. This house in particular was a foreclosure that was vacant for quite a while before we moved in, and the backyard was a jungle. Really. You stepped down off the bottom deck stair and the weeds were over your head!

We’re also pretty new at conservation. Not that I didn’t care about the earth and its creatures and resources before, it just didn’t seem to come up nearly as much in the condo. Now we have a lawn and plants to water, we have to consider whether or not to fertilize our herbs and tomatoes, weather to squash the poisonous spider hanging above our door and how to kill the weeds infesting our “backyard.” To make matters more complicated, our property backs up to a sliver of protected saltwater marsh. The marsh ecosystem is so important and so fragile, that I feel Rob and I (and others living in close quarters with wildlife) have a responsibility to learn and weigh the effects of even the smallest things we do that might affect the land.

Finally, I’m a new gardener. My mother and grandmother both had the coveted green thumb, if such a thing exists. Everything they touched turned green, bloomed, produced fruit, whatever it was meant to do, but in abundance. Mom always had vases full of rooting plant pieces on windows, her yard and porch were filled with lush plants and she could tell you the name of almost every flower, tree or plant she would encounter in the Southeast.

The sad thing was that I didn’t share her interest, and I would joke that the green thumb “gene” had passed me by. Sure, I have some great memories as a little girl wandering through Rahn’s Greenhouses while mom picked out new plants. The rows and rows of vegetation was breathtaking - for me, the only place that induces a similar feeling is standing in an enormous library full of books. It’s the feeling of being surrounded by such a large number of something so wonderful. It’s more like being enveloped than surrounded. The smell, the sound. It’s like you could just sit down in the middle of a row in a library or greenhouse, close your eyes and you’d still have the feeling of being in a place unlike any other. At least that’s what I remember from the greenhouse. But then I was a little girl, and children experience things very differently than adults do.

As an adult, I’ve killed the few plants that I owned (all gifts from mom), and I assumed I was destined to be a plant-killer all my life. Until almost two months ago when we got this house with a yard and deck. It’s like a switch flipped, and I wanted plants everywhere. Beginning with a little abandoned asparagus fern that “came” with the house, I’ve begun acquiring plants of all shapes and sizes, and I just can’t get enough or learn enough.

Maybe this is the start of something wonderful. This is the diary of my journey. Enjoy, laugh, shake your head sadly, give advice maybe even learn a little with me…