Deborah Corrao / L’Observateur / April 21, 2000

One of the advantages of growing older is that we finally begin to get a sense of who we really are. We are able to discard the blinders of youth with all itspretensions and ambitions. This can be liberating but also alarming.For instance, now that I’m wiser, I can admit to my love-hate relationship with gardening. I am most happy during the winter months when the yard requires theleast of me. Everything is brown. I don’t need to water or to fertilize or to weed. Infact, I can even feel good about gardening in the winter.

In February, I bought two huge terra cotta pots. The purchase was not so muchabout gardening as it is about imagining myself on some terrace in some villa somewhere along the Mediterranean (you know, places where you’d expect to see lots of that kind of stuff).

Since that time I’ve kept my eyes on the rise and fall of potting soil prices, waiting for just the right time to make my big spring investment. I broke down last week atWal-Mart and bought some soil. Now I’m waiting for the garden genie to take it outof my car and pour it into those pots.

Just kidding. Well, maybe not.If past experience can predict the fate of this year’s crop, you can bet that a lot of new plants will get an auspicious start in my backyard this weekend, but somewhere around the middle of June, they will succumb to what I like to refer to as benign neglect. New growth will begin to look brown around the edges unless wehappen to have a particularly wet growing season. Weeds will spring from nowhereand choke off whatever thirst hasn’t killed. And wherever I don’t constructbarricades around will become the victim of my son’s love-hate relationship with the lawnmower.

I can’t blame this phenomenon on genetics. My mother’s yard looks like a tropicalparadise.

She hasn’t given up on me yet. Whenever I visit, she gives me cuttings and newplants she’s rooted.

But there has to be something a little sinister in her nature since she knows that putting the lives of new plants into my hands is the kiss of death.

Oh, well, I’ll be out with shovel and rake this weekend. It’s always interesting to seewhat will still be standing in November.

Deborah Corrao is a regular columnist for L’Observateur

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