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