Once Upon A Garden

You know the story of why I stopped gardening two years ago, and that I'm re-booting this year.  But how did it all start?  With two extra tomato plants. When I was twenty-three, my mother had been gardening for about a year, and was still in the new gardener phase - you know the one, where you buy WAY more plants than you actually need, go nuts ordering from seed catalogs, and hunt down every gadget made of green plastic you can find?  Heh.

She swore she'd suck me into gardening, and I did resist as long as I could.  Then one day, she showed up at my house with two extra cherry tomato plants, begging me to give them a home.  "Put them in the compost bin!" I suggested; but she wasn't having any of that noise. She wanted them loved and cared for, and as much as I did NOT want a garden, I thought, fine, how hard could it be to just dig a couple of holes?  Famous last words, as they say.

At first I tried hard to only keep my gardening to the useful plants - vegetables, medicinal herbs, herbs for tea, bushes and things that would yield stakes and stalks I could recycle and use in the garden.  I decided right away that it would only be organic gardening for me.  Useful. Practical. Economical. Safe. Earth-friendly.

Yeah, that lasted.  At least, the last part did.  I held out for many years before I succumbed to *pink* flowers, but it was only a year before flowers in general started creeping in.  It started with the strawberry plants, I believe.

After all...isn't beauty useful?  Of course it is.  If not beauty, then what else?  Whole worlds opened up before me.

Sadly, I have very few pictures left of those first years, which happened before instant-mobile-phone-uploads and online sync-able photo galleries.  Most of my gardens for years were in containers, because I was a renter.  

It wasn't until I bought my house in 2004 that I could really tear up the ground and just go nuts the way I'd always wanted to.  And I did...right up until 2010, and you know the rest.

Hope is a thing with leaves.

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