published April 21, 2005
My husband, Dale, does his best to keep the lawn mowed and the hedges trimmed. He cuts back the roses and waters everything dutifully. That our house is not a landscaping masterpiece is purely my fault. I can kill a plant in one month. Just ask the folks at our local Home Depot.
Every spring I get high hopes about having baskets, pots and flowerbeds bursting with color around my yard. I visit the Home Depot next to Sam’s Club and pace around the garden department, eyeing the merchandise and running my cart into the hose in the aisles. I stop and read the signs in front of each display, even the tiny print on the stakes in the pots. Sometimes I have specific plants in mind but usually I just buy bright flowers and exotic greens.
Excited by my purchases, I bring them home and put them around my patio. Over the next few weeks, I watch them carefully. They seem happy and look like they want to thrive; then suddenly the blooms fall off or they all wither, and my exhilaration spirals down to desperation, then acceptance. And off I go to buy more plants.
I know that Home Depot has a one-year guarantee for its plants. I know that I could bring these wilted, brown sticks back to the store and exchange them for new ones. Two problems stop me from doing this.
One is that I never keep the receipt. I don’t like to keep receipts around for long periods of time, so I usually toss them after a couple of weeks. Even if I did save an entire year’s worth of Home Depot receipts I’d have to find the specific one for each dead plant, and I don’t always know what it used to be. I kill so many of them… did I just annihilate the day lily or the calla lily? Soon I’d be on Home Depot’s list of people who aren’t allowed to shop in the garden department without the manager’s approval.
The second problem is shame. If I bring a dead plant back to the store, someone in an orange apron is going to tell me exactly what I did wrong and will probably give me the “tsk, tsk” face while they’re doing it. At my age, I really don’t need the humiliation.
The plants that die quickly are at least merciful. Within hours after the receipt has been tossed, they begin to wilt to the side. I water them and they wilt more. I stop watering them and they die. I tell myself that they were probably sickly when I bought them, and that I at least took them out of their pots and gave them some freedom before that long sleep.
Then there are the plants that won’t live and won’t die. Last year’s fuchsias were hearty souls when I brought them home. I sat their plastic pots inside clay ones and placed them on the patio where they could get “partial sun” as their directions indicated. They bloomed happily. But when I actually planted them in the clay pots, their branches turned brown overnight and most of the leaves fell off. They’ve stayed that way for a year now.
They taunt me with their misery daily. “If you’d give us what we need, we’d thrive!” I wish I knew. I’ve watered them, fed them, starved them and moved them, all to no avail. I even considered taking them to the emergency room, but I don’t think Placentia-Linda Hospital has a fuchsia ward. Perhaps euthanasia is called for, but I’m not ready to say good-bye.
My roses are the one bright spot in the yard. Every year, my husband gets me bare root roses for Mother’s Day. Out of a perverse sense of fun, I have him plant them around our swimming pool. Let’s just say that I don’t have to tell the kids not to run around there. My roses bloom in glorious shades of yellow and coral and red, but don’t look too closely at the rest of the plant. Their leaves are jaundiced and burnt, and it appears that something is chewing on them. How the darn things keep blooming is a mystery to me.
Still, I have hopes of someday being able to sit on my patio surrounded by vines and ferns and beds full of flowers. I’m reminded of my grandmother, who had a wonderfully green thumb and a sense of humor. Once in the middle of a very cold, snowy night in Decatur, Illinois, she went out and tied plastic red roses to all of the vines that wound around her white clapboard fence. I wonder if anyone still makes plastic plants…