The kiss of the sun for pardon

Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 3:48 AM

and so on goes the poem by Dorothy Gurney, who died the year I was born. This describes how I feel.

I have become a gardener-not a "Master Gardener", but at least an enthusiastic amateur. I have been buying plants the way some women shop for clothes, the better the bargain, the more thrilled me. It's become an obsession admittedly, weekends are spent visiting garden centers, surfing for garden forums, buying garden books and magazines. Sunday is the day when I devote myself to working outside, which is ever so much more fun than doing housework inside.

I do not have a drop dead gorgeous yard, overcoming nine years of neglect and acclimating to the hot Georgia summers is not accomplished immediately. I figure it will take three years to whip things into shape.The nice thing is that I have what is known as a blank slate for the most part, the previous owners of my house did little in the way of landscaping. There were some azaleas and a few other shrubs, but nothing spectacular.Since I plan to stay in this house until I am carried out, I thought that I needed to reclaim and improve upon things and that has been slow going.

 I thought since my husband was English and everyone knows that the English are mad for gardening, that I would have an enthusiastic partner in my endeavor. The gardening gene seems to have escaped my husband so this has been a singular work by me, an army of one.

Fortunately, not being picky about what work a woman can or should do, I am out there, sawing down trees, hauling branches and bags of soil and stone. The trunk of my car has enough dirt in it to be a flowerbed and I REALLY need a pickup or something along those lines.

 Weird plants are my forte-it's what I hunt for and what I do try to incorporate into the scheme. Yes, I do have the afore mentioned azaleas (a Georgia garden prerequisite), and gardenias, also very popular in the south, but I am trying to push the envelope with some tropical plants that are not necessarily cold hardy in my "zone". The other extreme is my hunt for a lilac that will flourish here, one of my favorite and best memories of growing up in New England. Lilacs and the southern climate do not play well together. Fall or autumn rekindles longing for the colors that I took for granted in my youth and am trying to recreate now, since once again the climate is not conducive to northern trees. Japanese maples are as close as I can come to that and those little beauties are not cheap.

 It has been a process of much work, a little blood, alot of sweat and a few tears, but it is soul satisfying, and stressfree and those are things you learn to value or should.