Planting Seeds Of Thought

Day 83: It's that time of year again! The Park catalog has arrived and I've been thumbing through its pages, trying to decide what to attempt this year. The results of my labors are relatively unvariable: I carefully cultivate seedlings in every windowsill, on top of the washing machine under lights, sometimes even on the kitchen counter from March until June when it's safe to put my babies out of doors. And then...and then I forget all about them, and if something happens to crop up with a blossom on the end of a stalk some time in August, I'll say, "Oh, wow! I got a paper daisy!"

I am a haphazard gardener. If it likes the conditions it is forced to endure by both me and the weather and actually manages to survive to the blooming point, I will put it on my list of successes to be repeated in subsequent years. If it withers and dies, I'll probably forget what it was and try it again a few years down the line. I only plant flowers. At vegetables, I am a total failure. I flunked zucchini. My radishes never made roots. But enough flowers survive my ministrations (gazanias, notably, and occasionally a rudbeckia or zinnia or calendula) that I always sit down with the Park catalog as soon as it arrives, joyously selecting what I can kill this year.