Right about now, everyone’s at the nursery. They’re scoping out the hanging baskets. They’re buying gardening gloves. They’re picking up watering cans and bird feeders and ceramic pots and flats of beans and sweet peas and petunias.
They’re navigating their carts up and down the aisles and checking out the little plastic tags protruding from the pretty little flower pots. Full sun, one might say. Or: Part shade. Or: Needs even watering.
I love the nursery.
I love the nursery in the way a gymnast loves the gym or a handyman loves the hardware store.
Or — maybe not. After all, a handyman loves the hardware store because he works magic with the stuff he buys there. Not the case with me and the nursery.
The gardening store is my happy place. The garden, not so much.
Still, I try.
“Ooooh,” I swooned the other day. My husband and I were you know where, and I was eyeballing the annuals.
“Those little cornflowers are so pretty! Wouldn’t they pair perfectly with these pink geraniums?”
“Didn’t you get those last year?” he asked. “And didn’t they end up dead?”
I shot him a look.
“OK!” I said. “So I did something wrong!”
This is the issue with the garden and me. Most years, I do something wrong. Or perhaps it’s that I don’t do something right. I can’t really tell, but frankly, it hardly makes a difference.
At the nursery, everything looks so, well, healthy. And happy. And hard to resist.
“I want to give the vegetable garden a go again,” I informed the husband. “Let’s get six pots each of kale, broccoli, carrots, beans, peppers and beets.”
“Really?” said the husband.
“What do you mean — ‘really’?” I asked.
“Last year, the kale became infested with something and we had to rip it up. The carrots had holes in them and the beets never grew.”
The husband has a good memory.
“OK!” I said. “Then we’ll just get peppers, beans and broccoli.”
Never mind that I don’t much care for broccoli — or peppers, for that matter. At least they amounted to something.
The nursery, let’s just say, has such promise. And at this time of year, it’s packed with people who are eager to inject their property with colour and their vegetable plots with bounty.
Some year, I’m hoping that some of the nursery’s magic will rub off on me, and that I’ll be able to walk away with a few things that might not perish before the end of the season.
Until then, think I’ll get me a nice little bird bath. I think it would look really sharp in the yard, and odds are, it may even survive.
