A midsummer day's slump

Gardens everywhere have slipped into their usual midsummer slump, when temperatures soar and plants droop, their leaves eventually draping together on the ground to form one big, wilty mass. OUR plants are way ahead of most in this annual display, having entered the midsummer slump soon after being planted in May (and continuing through September). A few have given up completely, expressing their wishes in a last will and testament: "Just lay us on the compost heap," they beg.


My solution is to get MORE plants to make things look less pathetic. Unfortunately it is also midsummer slump at the nurseries, and the only available plants look as if they have been dug up from gardens like mine, repotted, and plunked on a table for sale. I might be buying back some of my own plants without knowing it.


So I find myself, in 175% humidity, planting new flowers, despite knowing that in a week or so they will look just like the rest of the plants. Hope springs eternal, but so does stupidity.


However, we did achieve a small milestone this summer: The flowers in the hanging baskets have survived longer than any of their predecessors. On the plant tags of the baskets I buy, they generally say warn, "Blooms all summer, unless the Princess is in charge. Then, 2 days." I have no explanation for the unexpected longevity this year, other than maybe no one told these plants that I was in charge.


The Hero has joined the effort to keep things alive. His way of doing this is to water the same plants I've already watered, and to forget the ones I also forgot. He has taken up where my father left off years ago, helping me kill off my plants. Underwatering, overwatering -- we'll do them in somehow.


"We need some sort of schedule," I say, like parents might make when they have a lot of kids' stuff to keep track of: Timmy gets medication at 7:00, Jessica at 5:30, Melissa NONE. Even this might not help US if we had kids -- not only would we forget to give Timmy his medication at 7:00, we would say in bewilderment, "We have a kid named Timmy?"


To help offset our plant ineptness, the Hero suggests planting plastic flowers, which is tempting. With my luck, however, there are plastic-chewing bugs out there somewhere -- probably China -- and they would find our garden. We would be the only gardeners in history whose plastic flowers died of insect invasion.

And so we will struggle through the midsummer slump, as always. And if temperatures don't cool down soon, I may be ready for the compost heap.