No leaves, no need to water - sounds like the perfect garden
By Beth Teitel
Thursday, June 10, 2004
I usually dread gardening season. I'm surrounded by people who are blissfully communing with the earth and throwing around showoff terms such as ``weeding'' and ``pruning,'' while I'm stressing out at the nursery, hoping the saleswoman can't tell I'm lying through my teeth.
Bright indirect light? Of course, my garden gets it all day. Right - and I'm going to fertilize, too, and transfer the thriving plant to a larger pot when the time comes.
Part of me - unfortunately a very small part - knows it's foolish to spend my hard-earned money on flox and peonies that I'll eventually torture to death, withholding all food, water and light as if I were softening them up before an interrogation.
And yet, I can't stop myself. I'm like a gambler who doesn't have the cards, but is convinced that Lady Luck is right around the corner. I refuse to fold.
Each spring finds me back at the garden store, credit card itching for a swipe, fantasizing about how wonderful my outdoor greenery will look. (Or maybe the word's brownery.)
It's no wonder the gardening industry's topped $40 billion. Pretty soon they'll come right out and call it gaming.
But this year, things are going to be different. This year, my garden won't resemble a horticultural crime scene. No more crunchy leaves littering the ground beneath the hanging plants. No more dusty flower pots.
But not because I'm going to start watering - that'll be the day. Instead, I'm going to become part of the best gardening trend since the debut of HGTV: I'm going to blow my botanical budget on gardening ``hardware'' - decorative pottery, outdoor furniture, copper watering cans.
Pam Danziger, the author of ``Why People Buy Things They Don't Need,'' calculates that sales of gardening ``hardware'' rose 26.4 percent between 2000 and 2002, compared with an 8.5 percent growth rate for ``software'' (those labor-intensive plants and shrubs, and the rest of the dreaded flora family).
Who needs to be sent on a guilt trip by a delphinium in its death throes, when an outdoor sculpture satisfies the gardening instinct?
(Except if you're a gardening purist who doesn't consider grilling gardening - and who needs those people?)
So let's see . . . What should I plant this year? Smith & Hawken makes a lovely shade perennial - a teak oval table. And I bet rubber clogs would thrive. And of course, I'll need one of those hardy Hamptons-style baskets for toting basil and tomatoes cut fresh - off someone else's vine.
