Gangsta Crap

October 24, 2005

It’s misting again outside, but harder than it has been the past two mornings. It’s enough to change the timbre of the cars as they pass by our house, enough to start the germination of all those native seeds I have yet to plant. Enough to make you a little sad if you stand in it by yourself and feel the fall coming on.

Maybe it’s just because I’m done paying bills (which is always excruciating to me), or because my wife is talking to her estranged father on the phone, but the sadness gripped me when I stood on the porch looking out at the massive juvenile California sycamore we planted when Ryan was born.

There are reasons I’m a frustrated gardener. Probably one is, like the bonsai artists, I want to control the world, and it angers me when it doesn’t listen to my commands.

Looking at that beautiful tree we planted when Ryan was born I think of how different I want the world to be, a longing for peace. In my garden I hope to undo a little of what my fellow humans have instigated on the very ground we walk on. Ridiculous as that sounds as a man who lives in a dirty, crime-ridden city, it’s something I still believe strongly.

There was a day, a cold day last year, maybe the year before, Wendy was working and I took the children to Descanso Gardens to have a look around and ride the train once around the park. It was around this time of year, and the winter rains were just setting in. It wasn’t that cold when we started, but by the time I bought them hot chocolate and I held Abby’s little ice cube hands in mine, I felt terrible for letting her run around without gloves on.

They both fell fast asleep by the time I came home. I put them into their beds, turned on the radio, and started to wash dishes and look out at the beautiful rain.

Just then shots rang out, about a block away from our house. I could barely make out a black SUV driving away and a figure lying down. Police cars arrived in waves no more than three minutes later and neighbors started pouring out of their houses to find out what had happened.

Of course it was gang related. Of course all these misguided kids were killing each other like the assholes they admire so much.

I went back to my house and said, “We are moving”.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of how ineffectual my puttering in the garden had been. How, like the priest in the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby he walks away from the grave and “no one was saved”.

I believed strongly in God when those kids were shot and killed. And I do still, mostly. I don’t wonder how He would let them do something so horrible as that. He has let much, much more horrible things happen on a daily basis for everyone, humans, animals, and insects alike.

I wondered, tonight, staring out at that black, black rain, about another man’s garden, in a country like Iraq. A garden that has seen dictators come and go, withstood wars, jihads, and so much human misery.

Those closest to God, even the Buddhists who don’t necessarily even believe in Him, would tell me to continue to garden, regardless.

Mother Theresa continued to heal the sick though Calcutta would always churn out an infinite number more than she could ever heal, or help through the night as they passed out of her arms and into their Lord’s.

And those people would tell you that Smith & Hawken, Gardener’s Eden, Sunset, and your Sunday supplement are full of shit. There is Gardening, and then there is all the crap thrown on top of it. There is a deep reason for putting your hands in that soil and it may not always be clear. Many of those incredibly, wonderfully, unfathomably smart people would tell you they were not always clear, either, but you should do it.

Because it is in your bones.

Do it if you’re tired. Or nervous. Or feel like taking a rifle to every gangbanger, politician, and black SUV driver in sight.

There is a connection between your hands and the earth that started before you were born. Probably before any of us were born.

And it is as rich as any loam you could find in the finest garden on the earth.

Box Stores and Gardeners and Whiskers on Kittens

October 20, 2005

It’s 8:30 at night, 68 degrees outside, the children are (finally) asleep, Wendy is being taken out for her birthday by our friend Denise, and, I finally get a chance to sit down and write.

This morning, the light came streaming in where the eucalyptus once stood. All that remain of the giant are tiny woodchips and (ironically) a little replanted jade plant the tree guys had to relocate when they disassembled the fence to get the stump grinder in.

I’m not going to be romantic about this tree. You can write poems about them, you can drain them of sap to make syrup, use their fronds for houses, curse them when you hit your head on them, and you can cut them down when they become a nuisance. I’m not crazy about killing living things, but there are several factors about this tree you have to consider. One, in a good wind limbs drop on my roof. In fact, all the crap it drops on a regular basis are giving my saltillo tile roof a half life (I’m guessing $20K to replace). These things explode when they catch fire. Okay, maybe that’s a myth, but still… Two, it really doesn’t belong here in the first place. All the eucalyptus trees you see in California are related to ones brought over by one guy from Australia in the 30’s and 40’s as windbreaks, landscaping, etc. Yes, they are drought tolerant, but they don’t feed any wildlife that I know of and they stink to high hell. Which brings us to point three: they stink to high hell. Wendy wanted to get rid of it when we moved in and has always regretted not doing it before we did.

For the job of removal we ended up going with Paul instead of Javier, our normal gardener. Besides the money thing (which was about a $2K difference) I was unsure if Javier could pull the dang thing off without killing him and us in the process. What I haven’t done, unfortunately, is tell him someone else ripped out the tree. I have four days to do that before he comes over here and discovers it for himself.

Worse yet, I’m going to have to tell him we’re going to attempt to take care of the yard ourselves starting next month. “Just in time for Christmas”, Wendy commented when I told her.

I told her that wasn’t making the decision any less difficult. Javier has been working in this garden for at least 15 years. I’ve heard about his kids going to school and then college, and for a guy who came from Zacatecas, Mexico 30 some years ago, he’s done all right. It’s nice knowing, too, in some way we helped him by being his clients. It’s the opposite feeling you get when you go to visit the near Dead people at Costco or Wal-Mart to purchase some cheap shoes made for a nickel in China.

Okay, I’ve got a thing about box stores. And though I was probably halfway there anyway, working with my hands in the garden and seeing the fruits of my own labors (so to speak) has certainly pushed me the rest of the distance to hating gross consumerism.

The Javier decision is an economic one. We can either try to keep the filth in the house under control by bringing in a maid once or twice a month or we could have Javier. We can’t have both. We’re damn lucky to have even one. But my Saturdays are spent vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms while Wendy is at work, so you can probably venture a guess I’d much rather be out in the yard on those days.

What worries me, of course, is what if I make the discovery I can’t keep up with the damn thing.

He and his helper can fill one of those 90-gallon green trashcans every week with stuff from our yard. I have to figure out if I can do that without losing my mind and killing my family. Honestly, there’s a lot to love about this yard: we’re organic, we’re certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat (or front in our case), and whenever I’m out working I always here people say, “I love your yard”.

But then again, there’s a hell of a lot to hate: we’re inundated with Bermuda grass that Paul, the guy who lived here before, failed to kill before planting drought tolerant plants, it always looks like a mess to me, and I honestly get the feeling on some days I’m Sisyphus trying to roll that boulder up the hill before the damn thing comes down again and tries to run me over.

Maybe I should get my Master’s in Mythology of Gardening.

Hell, it’s California, someone’s probably already offering it.

Probably Berkeley.

Stinky Australians

October 5, 2005

The Santa Ana winds are up. People in many parts of the country are putting on their warm jackets and collecting leaves to burn. In Los Angeles today it was 94 degrees and the leaves and the trees and the grass and several houses were burning regardless of anyone trying to collect them.

I think about the Santa Anas every year when they come up. Like the French Mistral winds, they are full of mystery. I can imagine people in the 1800s blaming all sorts of things on these winds. Anything from ripping down a neighbor’s fence to murder. Notably, I’ve never seen anyone go crazy from these particular winds. And even in a litiginious state like this has its limits for alibis. (Up to now, anyway.)

I’m going back to the back yard.

I started here years ago. And now I’m back. If I stay another 11 years, I imagine I’ll be back again a few times. Maybe I’ll leave a note for myself so I don’t forget what I’ve done.

We’ve decided to finally call it a day on the grass. Yes, men of suburban USA, I have given up on this goddamn grass and I am putting in something else. Something that uses less water maybe. Something that doesn’t die in patches when you put a pool on it for 4 hours one summer day. Something that isn’t a colossal waste of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, and insecticide. Maybe bark. Wendy and I did take an honest look at the area (it didn’t take long, it’s only 500 sq. feet. There was still time for drinks and snacks.) and after thinking of what we use it for – parties, setting up the kids’ pool, something to waste water on – we both decided that grass was a waste. Unfortunately, I, like every other man in this country it seems, have been indoctrinated with pictures of kids lying on the cool, downy soft grass and watching clouds pass by. “Damn it, why can’t I give my kids at least that!”, I’d say in my head as I watered the browning St. Augustine, Bermuda, or what have you. I will try to remind myself that I am a former cult member and these thoughts, along with looking at pictures of naked women and taking bong hits while driving, were never really such a hot idea in the first place. And were a lot less hot after getting married.

It was only a matter of time, of course, for Wendy to look up at the towering 80 foot Eucalyptus that some ignoramus planted three feet from my house (and thus leaning precariously over my roof) and say, “We’ve really got to get rid of that thing.” She’s right, I know. Those things explode when they catch fire. They stink. They peel incessantly. Their branches fall on everything including my roof and my neighbor’s cactus garden. And my roofer told me I could take 5 years off the life of my roof if I don’t do anything about it. “But it’s been there for, what, 20 years?” I still counter, hoping that it doesn’t sound as dumb to her as it does to me.

But of course it does. So the first call I make is to our gardener, Javier. He shows up as I’m trying to eat lunch on a Sunday. He’s dressed in church clothes or realtor clothes (I can never tell) and assesses the situation. He pats the tree and says, “Mr. Tim. I’ve talked to a couple guys who have the equipment. And I’m thinking to cut down this tree and that one (he points to the other godforsaken eucalyptus which is also three feet away from my house, but has chosen to try to knock over my fence instead of smashing through my roof)… is, um…” And he pauses. I’m not a fan of his pauses. Because even though he does things very inexpensively when he pauses it means it sounds like a lot of money, even to him. “It’s a big tree, Mr. Tim.” Okay, that’s worse than a pause. That is a big red light warning me to run away. But I just stand there and take it like a man. A man who has chosen to put in bark instead of a lawn and will discuss this very expensive subject so his wife can sleep during the night when the winds blow. “Five, maybe six thousand.”

Man am I hoping he’s talking pesos. Even if it’s the new pesos, it’s still going to be cheaper than dollars.

But he is talking dollars. I go over the whole dance: what if we just take one down, trim two, trim one, and, lastly, take fifteen bucks and go in and tell my wife it’s impossible without knocking down the house first.

I do call another tree guy, Paul Shiver, who cut down the (Jesus, who are the people who planted this bunch of loser trees around this property? Can I find them? Can I sue them?) 80-foot cottonwood tree which ripped up our entire front sidewalk and was, get this, something like 8 years old. Yes, that’s 10 feet a year. If you are looking for a tree to rip up everything in its path to give you shade, here’s your best bet. Did I fail to mention that they are riparian, nee river, trees? That means they put their roots out nice and low looking for water everywhere, thus the ripping up asphalt and concrete problem. It also means that these 80-foot wonders don’t hold onto a heck of a lot of soil and can end up in your house with Piglet, Pooh, and Owl on a particularly blustery day.

Paul, who ripped out the cottonwood 5 years ago remembers our house when I call him. Not the house, the tree. “That was a big tree,” he says. For some reason I thought these guys were always ripping out big trees. Wow, he’s going to love his next challenge. But I called him, because even though I asked Javier if he’s bonded, I’m not really sure he is. And I’d hate to discover that moments after one of his guys accidentally bungee jumps through our front window.

Which leaves me hear, 9pm, 70 degrees, and waiting for Paul Shiver’s bid so I can actually bite my tongue off in conversation.

I could look at my bank account again. But that’s not really going to do me much good. I know this money’s coming out of the home equity loan. You remember that loan, don’t you? The one your financial guy tells you not to touch and yet the home equity people keep dreaming up new ideas how to use it: new bathroom, new car, new pool… or, in my case, new hole in your back yard where that stupid ass eucalyptus used to be.

September 19, 2005

First rain of the season. First rain! Good lord, when was the last time we saw rain in September? My notes are bad, or I would tell you.

Everything is approaching the end of the season here, which means it’s time to go out and begin the heavy work of the fall. It’s different here than a lot of the rest of North America, fall is actually the best time to plant native plants, shrubs, and trees, because the rains of winter will soak the soil and let them set their roots deep into the earth. The rest of everything must be cut back. Not because the snows will bury them, but they’ll begin new green growth through the spring. The Matilijas, Mexican Sage, Butterfly Bush, and Fennel, all who have become heavy with seeds, must be cut down to the ground. No matter how many times I do it, I am always in awe that they come back, and just how quickly. The Lion’s Tail is leggy, as it is twice a year, and will have to be cut back by a third. The roses are coming back into bloom, after a month’s break (mine never seem to bloom during the heat of the summer – perhaps it’s because I starve them for water, which is no matter for me – we have native roses that make it here, these can certainly give it the old college try).

The rains, of course, have got me to thinking about the garage roof and the gutters I’ve failed to clean out. The leaves have just barely begun to fall on many of the trees, and I’ve been putting off going on to the roof for a month now. And not just because Ryan is insisting on “helping” me this year. We’ve got a 60 foot eucalyptus tree about four feet from our house that looms precariously over the roof. It scares the bejeezus out of Wendy. So much so that she wants it cut down. I’m not quite at that point, but I do often wonder who was stupid enough to plant a tree like that so close to the house. I know it sure as hell wasn’t me. When you live in a house and garden this old, you get used to looking at people’s mistakes (and your own) and learn to live with them until you can a) fix them yourself b) pay someone else to fix them. Getting rid of that tree, which I’m sure will run $2K, is not at the top of my list. You know that list, the one where everything costs two thousand dollars and above? Insulation, refinish the hardwood floors, paint the outside of the house, rip out the trees, get new gutters, install a fence around the front yard… Need I go on? You have your own list, so I’m sure I don’t have to. It’s depressing, that list. I don’t have it written down anywhere, it’s just we start talking about something like the tree and all those other items magically appear as if out of thin air. We talk a bit about making an actual list (we could have already crossed out redoing the moulding in the kitchen), but we become too exhausted about three-quarters of the way of discussing it. I think it’s me who usually changes the subject.

Which is why, if we have another record breaking rainy season, I am going to get it when it starts to really come down.

I installed the garage gutter by myself. And I just had the roofing guys come and take a look at why it was leaking (which wonderfully had nothing to do with my crappy handling of tools and vinyl guttering). Still, it’s a small area back there and I should really divert the water, like everyone else in the city, down into the gutter system so it can make the LA River swell to an enormous size. Every year our playroom, which used to be the two car garage, leaks a little bit. And it makes me nervous. I have no idea why I don’t just call the damn gutter guy. Maybe I believe it’s admitting defeat. I have a rain barrel back there which I’m sure is helping me save the earth with every 50 gallons I save (which is like a lot of people’s morning showers). Maybe I’m just damn cheap.

Honestly, I did call four gutter guys last year and exactly one called me back. One. When I arranged to meet him, I waiting here for four hours, and called him twice and left messages. I talked to this guy on the phone for 15 minutes, he knows what my house looks like, what the problem is, I know that his son lives close by. And yet, and yet, I never heard from him again. I called him the next day, just to make sure he’d gotten my messages. Got me. If I learned one thing from the experience, it’s that I know I should have my son go into gutter repair if he wants to make a good living.

Hey, they’re doing so well, they don’t every have to call anyone back.

Scrapping It

So, there's just so much to be said about the past and I'm beginning to realize just how difficult it is to write from your own perspective even two years ago, not to mention nine.

Nine years ago I had exactly zero children (which is one of the few things I'm absolutely sure about) and 500 different plants in my garden. Today ithovers right around two children and 250 plants. Luckily for my wife (and children) I'm a considerably better father than I am gardener.

So, going forward, suffice it to say that when we moved into this house, I had a learning curve equivalent to Ben Franklin's when he popped into the Stevens household on Bewitched.

It's 2005 everybody, get on your party hats.

Gardening with children has its own difficulties. They always want to help, for instance. Yesterday I snuck out to the storage room to get my tools so I could fix a sprinkler in peace. Maybe if I cursed more like my friend Jerry, they'd leave me alone.

It does make me sad, though. My dad wasn't around as much when we were kids and by the time he took me out to show me how to change the oil in the car, I really wanted to just go back inside and listen to the Talking Heads or watch Gilligan's Island.

Yesterday's sprinkler repair wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, merely swapping out heads. It unfortunately does involve digging a lot of dirt and grass out from around the sprinkler head, something I fail at repeatedly, as I always end up with a great deal of dirt falling back into the pipe where the new head goes. (I always shortcut around this problem by turning the system on and blasting the dirt out via the created geyser shooting up through the pipe.)

I even got a "Man, that job is the worst" from a passing dad, who added, "I've got two at home I've been putting off". Which is much better than what I expected to hear: "I've got two at home you can do when you're done". Though I don't think anyone messes with a guy covered in dirt and laying prostrate on the ground with a screwdriver in his hand.

These sprinkler heads that I'm always fixing, by the way, are located on the area at home we used call "The Dead Zone". It's the area no one wants to mow or water. Located between the street and the sidewalk, the homeowner does not own this land, but is responsible for its upkeep. A fact we learned about when we needed to have our sidewalk repaired due to cottonwood tree roots ripping the living heck out of it.

Everything happens to these sprinkler heads. I see bikes riding over them, strollers, skateboards... I once saw a 16-wheel truck drive over some when making a three-point turn on my corner. I end up replacing one of these every other month. I do have Javier, the gardener, do a few as well (which sucks for him, I let him do all the ones where the line breaks and involves a lot of digging, replacing, and gluing).

I daydream each time I'm on my belly ripping one of these things out that I cover this area in bark and native plants and can forget about doing anything but weeding and summer watering.

But then again, I don't know if I'm up for adding another 15 plants to my care.

Mid-April - 1994

I don’t want to be too harsh on the garden or give you the impression that this was a bundle of weeds out my front door, far from it. When we moved in, we saw the lushest array of plants I’d seen since the botanical gardens. The front yard was alive with a riot of flowers (love that expression) in every color and shape imaginable. Gigantic Matilija Poppies at 7 feet with what look like fried eggs atop each, gigantic purple plumes of what we came to call Dr. Suess Plant, blue and white rosemary, 15 different kinds of heirloom roses, canna lilies, ginger, magnolia flowers, acacias, hibiscus, lavenders, love-in-a-mist, borage, oleander... It’s not a big yard, but every part of it was covered in blooms that April. Butterflies floated through our path as we brought moving boxes in the front door, bees swarmed the blues and reds, drunk with nectar, and hummingbirds dove through the foliage at speeds I thought unimaginable. We moved in at just the right time, spring.

That first weekend I took my coffee and sat on the wood bench in the front yard, writing. I thought, “Now I’ve really made it. A house of my own, a garden of my own.” After growing up as an Air Force brat and living for years among the expatriates of Los Angeles, it felt like I was finally at home.

I was at home. But it wasn’t going to be as simple as just sitting there with my cup of coffee and drinking up the cool spring morning.

Endings like that are for movies and books.

And we know better than to believe those, right?

April -1994

Javier Montes, who would come to be our gardener for 11 years, came and introduced himself to Wendy while she was still unboxing her stuff and getting my crap out of the hallways and wherever else I had dropped it before going back for more at my apartment. Javier, like many Angelenos, came to this city after growing up somewhere else. In his case it was the region of Mexico named Zacatecas. When he showed up at the door, Wendy was in grubby jeans and t-shirt, after having sweated through moving the bed from one side of the room to another, seeing which way looked best. Javier, on the other hand, was dressed impeccably in a shirt and tie, black hair and mustache slicked back, which we came to know as his Realtor Look. Kind of a roll reversal, I might add. Javier also sells real estate, or tries to, to the mostly Spanish speaking population of nearby Silverlake, Echo Park, and Eagle Rock. From what I gather he’s not incredibly successful, but he does enough to have an office number at a local realty agency and the chutzpah to ask once every 3 months if we are interested in selling our house.

But on the day he came by he was inquiring whether or not we’d be keeping him as the gardener. We’d never questioned it. He’d kept the garden for years and he obviously knew how to keep it, it seemed insane to let him go and try to decipher what the hell was going on out in the front yard ourselves. Our plumbing was already backed up and the bedroom was the color of green we came to call “vomit”, so we already had our work cut out for us.

Wendy and he shook on it, and there we had it, for $80 a month we would have someone to take one more chore off our hands. It seemed a bargain.

Well, it would have been a bargain if Javier took care of the whole garden from top to bottom. But he didn’t. To be honest, unless someone was actually living in a hut in our front yard and working in the soil while the sun was shining, we could never even dream of having this chore off our hands. We quickly learned that Javier is the standard “mow, blow, and go” gardener that homeowners know all-too-well. 80 bucks for four visits, I don’t know quite what we were expecting for $20 a week. But we got the standard watering, mowing, ear-splitting gas blower, a lot of raking, and a hearty Hi-O, Silver. It seemed like enough until we realized many of the plants were dying or in various stages of dying. An investigation of the drip irrigation system, poorly placed all across the walking paths revealed why: none of the damn system worked.

Drip irrigation systems (which were developed in the deserts of the Middle East) are a series of large tubes leading to smaller tubes leading to tiny emitters which spray onto the roots of specific plants, thus delivering water where it’s needed, but not the surrounding weeds. It sounds like a brilliant idea, and it is. But you have to keep in mind that this was probably one of the first non-commercial versions of this system and, like the first version of almost anything, it needed a lot of TLC. Okay, that’s being kind. This system sucked. It also revealed that Paul, the landscape architect who laid this oasis out, decided that his drip system should call the shots with plant’s watering needs instead of common sense. If he could deliver precise amounts of water to cacti and thirsty rose bushes (because he placed them on two different systems), why not stick them right by each other? Brilliant! Yes, brilliant indeed. You wouldn’t do such a thing, clueless, because you could end up selling the house and my girlfriend could go on a rampage against your decrepit Israeli-made piece of crap system and rip out all the hoses before we made any sense of them.

I’m not sure whether we were more screwed before or after the hoses were piled into the driveway roasting in the midday heat, ready to be chucked in the dumpster. But the fact was, we were pretty well screwed.

Day 1 - April, 1994

This will take place in the past. This much you should know.

My wife (then girlfriend), Wendy, and I moved into this house on a sunny day in 1994, probably one of the nicest houses on the street on a wide, Los Angeles boulevard.

We had been going out for a little over a year, but had been friends long before - 5 years? She had the money then and bought the house. She promised me a month's free rent if I moved in with her. How could I resist?

The house itself was built for a doctor and his family in 1927 in an area of Los Angeles known as Atwater Village, abutting the infamous Los Angeles River itself. A beautiful Spanish Colonial with brown saltillo tiles lining the roof and cupola, curious angles and arches inside, and the garden. My god, the garden.

Two men who lived here before we did, one of them, Paul, was a landscape architect. The house sits on a slight incline on the corner. Houses in our neighborhood aren't known for their big back yards (I'm thinking of my Mother's tiny one and my Dad's non-existent ones in South Philly) but the corner houses were moved clear back to the lot, leaving a wide expanse of lawn to cover the front. That wide expanse wasn't good enough for the landscaper, though. He tore all the grass out and put in plants. And plants. And plants. When we moved in, there must have been 125 different plants out front. Since he'd moved out after his lover had died, his mother had been taken care of the place for a few years. And we found what was left of the drip irrigation system out front. (But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Wendy had heard over the years how much I loved nature and the outdoors. We would go for walks in the mountains, in Joshua Tree, and through botanical gardens and I'd tell her how amazed I was what I couldn't only call "God's work". What I didn't know was when she began her search for a house that a garden would be a good selling point.

And this was more garden then I'd ever seen before.

We loved it, though and were relaxed once we'd met Javier, Paul's gardener. Thank God, we said, at least there's someone to take care of all this.

Man were we wrong.

By Way of Introduction

This whole thing was going to be a book, see? Then, after several months of trying in vain to sit down and write it, it became a loose series of journal pages and Word documents, all loosely grouped under the title “Frustrated Gardener”.

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Author’s Note

I did not intend on becoming a gardener, much the same way most people did not originally plan on working in middle management, talking all day about the widget industry, or becoming the janitor at their old high school. There’s a famous saying, “Some are born into greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them”, well you could just as easily say, “Some are born into gardening while others have gardening thrust upon them.”

This, my friend, is a tale of the latter.

You start out as a writer in a hovel in Venice, CA, and spending too many late nights in Tiny Naylor’s Diner listening to Talking Heads and filling reams upon reams of notebook pages until 4 AM every weekend, then you wake up one day to find yourself in a ground war to extract the last of the spent California Poppies from your yard while trying to make sure your son doesn’t run into the street.

It’s amazing how that this sort of stuff happens while you’re not paying attention, isn’t it?

I’m not complaining, far from it. I was fairly unhappy back there at Tiny Naylor’s (it may have had something to do with their weak coffee) and many times I find myself in the garden speaking to an unseen audience on such subjects as How to Weed without Hating Yourself and the Rest of the World; Hey, Ho, Where Did My Trowel Go?; and Wow, I’m Actually Learning to Like the Smell of Rotting Compost.

The audience has always been you. At least I hope it’s been you, because otherwise those 5+ years of therapy didn’t really pay off. And someone at Cigna is going to come looking for me.

What I’m saying is, if you meet me at a party, please don’t tell me you put down my book because you just couldn’t take the whining, crying, and bellyaching. I was counting on you to listen to all my drivel so I could go back into my house and not take it out on my wife, my children, and my incredibly cheap bottles of red wine.

You don’t become a frustrated gardener in a day.

Wait, actually you do.

So scratch that. It takes a long time to become a contented gardener. A wise gardener who knows the secrets to saving heirloom tomato seeds and dispenses advice over back fences like ATMs dole out 20 dollar bills.

Apparently, I’m not even halfway there, as I’m still having trouble raising large tomato plants I bought in four inch pots and forget the common and botanical names of plants the moment someone points at something in my yard and says, “What’s that called?”

So if you were looking for that book, please put this one down. I’m not kidding, I don’t want you coming up to me at Trader Joe’s and complaining that it’s not worth the $11.95 or whatever the hell you spent on this (of which I’m getting a nickel, so you can tell it’s REALLY not worth it to me). If that’s what you were looking for then pick up Rodales or Sunset, or, if you live in Southern California, Robert Smaus’ excellent book on growing plants out here. Those people won’t let you down.

I, on the other hand, am a dabbler, a procrastinator, and a guy who has no idea why it is you can plant four identical Mexican Sages in a row and three will do beautifully and one will die.

However, if you were looking to feel better about your own shortcomings as a gardener and maybe even as a human being, then you’ve come to the right place, fella (or ma’am).

I will guaranteed in this long intro that I have wounded, killed, or set fire to four times as many plants as you have. And am still chastising myself about it. (Mostly because Catholic guilt, much like a virus, never seems to go away.)

So this may be the very key to cheering you up.

Go ahead, I could use the nickels.

Tim Donnelly