When hiring new gardeners, I seldom check out the other yards they service. The best looking gardens grow from an owner’s own blood, sweat, and tears.
I have, however, finally learned to ask a few trick questions: “What is your official position on weeds?” for example, and “Do you own a pair of gardening gloves?”
I part from my gardeners yearly, thinking something better waits around the corner, some avid crew that can’t wait to get their hands on my crab grass. But who am I kidding; you get what you pay for, so I get what I deserve. At $100 a month, who’s going to beat a path to my door (if they can find it) – A botanist? It’s not reasonable or even particularly fair to expect much more than a leaf blower and a weed whacker.
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Someone who knows his or her way around a plant, let alone the names of plants, has yet to drop a flyer on my front porch.
The only good thing I can say about my current crew is that when I leave a piece of personal gardening equipment laying around – handclippers, rake, shovel -- it won't get mixed up with anything they've brought along.
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After visiting the gardens on the this weekend, I took a good hard look around the old homestead and faced what 8 months of solid neglect and denial can reap. It reaps a dose of reality. It reaps regret. It reaps a lot of “volunteers,” which in gardening lexicon means oxalis, dandelions, and asparagus fern. I don’t know why some of the more attractive plants never “volunteer” at my place, maybe they do, and then pull themselves up by the roots and high tail it to a neighbor’s house, safe from the riff raff.
So, I’ve devoted this spring to Project DIM: Do It Myself. It’s either that or hang a a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote by my front gate, What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Looking at the entire landscape, the task seems monumental. But divided into manageable square feet – well, you know, inch by inch, row by row, we’ll see what my garden grows. Something beyond the dandelions and asparagus fern, perhaps.
I don’t expect I’ll be a very good employee, but then consider the employer. There will probably be some whining and yelling; the threat of lawsuits followed by sulking and apologies.
It helps that once I hired myself, I decided this warranted a substantial investment. I got a raise.
