Garden update

There are many things for people to be concerned about these days. Things like health care, war, moral corruption, my garden. I'm sure you are all lying awake at night, wondering what is happening with my garden.

Actually, a lot is happening with my garden. Death, mostly. All of my pretty pink and white flowers -- whose name temporarily escapes me but is something hideous and sounds like a disease, like Aspiricum -- have gone to that great Garden in the Sky. All of them, at the exact same time. I don't blame them. It's as if a voice suddenly boomed down and said, "Aspiricum, your time has come. You are of no more earthly use to anyone. Come and join my Garden, which is nothing like that pitiful plot of land you've been living on." These flowers know a good retirement plan when they hear one. And so they just bowed over and died. This was, of course, the most numerous flower I planted, so half the garden now looks extremely forlorn.

There is a family near us who is renting just for a month, probably because their old garden was looking pretty wilty and they wanted someplace bright and cheery for the rest of the summer. Anyway, I was talking to the woman one day and she said, "Your rock garden is lovely."

Now, that might be a compliment if you are growing a rock garden. But I am not trying to grow a rock garden. I am trying to grow flowers. Apparently I would have better luck if I just uprooted all the flowers and let the rocks do their thing. It's true we have a lot of rocks, but if you look closely, you can see some actual flowers. You can tell they are not rocks because they have more color. Well, some of them do. Plus, there are usually a bunch of insects buzzing around the flowers. They don't seem too interested in the rocks.

I have also been engaged in a mighty battle with leaf-chewing insects and something else that likes to gnaw on my dahlias. I think the insects and something elses are winning. The pink dahlia looks perpetually like a sheared sheep.

But the weeds are doing fine. Oh, yes, they are really thriving! Every now and then I look out the front window and think, what a fine batch of weeds we grew this year! We should enter them in a contest.

Last night Joe and I took a walk around the neighborhood, admiring everyone else's gardens, which actually have identifiable flowers in them. Near where Baxter the Best Dog in the Whole World lives, I noticed some ivy whose color seemed otherworldly. Now, you know that I am not the world's greatest authority on plants, but even I suspected that they were not real. Joe leaned over to touch them. Sure enough, they were fake.

I may have mostly rocks in my garden, but at least my rocks are real.