Paradise lost
I confess, I’m a landscape designer junkie. Unfortunately, I need to throw a party so my visions and my reality can meet. BBB is the perfect soldier and my own personal dirt warrior. He’s happy to execute my every command and wish because even though I have a black thumb, my over-chemicalizing makes up for it with giant growth. I am the newly anointed Queen of Chernobyl.
I have surrendered to buying perennials (out of laziness) after finally recognizing that my version of an annual was that I thought they would come up annually…not necessarily so. My backyard garden was looking mighty fine if I say so myself. Every morning as I sipped my coffee, I’d joyfully look out the kitchen window and witness the harmony of the pink vinca, lavender and all my favorite flowers flourishing in the sunshine. It was paradise…until last week.
It started out innocently. Our invisible fence for Hamish started beeping, signifying the electric line had a break in it. After a trial of gadgets BBB purchased at Ace, Lowe’s and Home Depot, to fix the problem himself, he realized it was way above his pay grade. He called in the fence professional, who promptly found the issue. Apparently, my dirt warrior did not follow my directions and made an executive decision on his own—ultimately resulting in hmmmmm…how do I say? Biting him in the arse - which resulted in garden chaos that backfired big time!
Thus began the real quest – finding a water hose he buried under my beautiful garden. For the next three days he hunted for the results of his genius idea to put a hose under 4 yards of loam.
On day one, he looked like a miser hunting for a penny in the floorboards. On day two, I walked out to see how the ‘rectifying the problem’ was going. I’m about to say this as kind as I can; he was dog-digging, something Hamish had never seen a human do. BBB, the groundhogs and the moles had bonded.
I believe in his attempt to solve the problem, which he thought was brilliant at the time, he became one with the vermin and the moles started to put posters of his face in their underground bedrooms as their new hero. It looked like a movie set in a World War III explosion and not even a herd of raging starving deer could’ve done more damage.
In an effort to find what he was looking for; he had yanked every beautiful rooted plant and tossed them to the side. I could scarcely hear him through the dying gasps of my flowers that were unceremoniously yanked from their homes. All I could do was stand there and say “NOOOOOOOOOOO.”
I stumbled through the torn-up branches and limp floppy faded flowers and sat on my little garden bench. He sensed I was traumatized and sat down beside me. “I swear I thought I knew where I put that hose.”
“Obviously,” I replied weakly.
“Well, I guess I’m done for now. Tomorrow’s another day” he said, resigned, and brushed off the dirt. He got up and started to head towards the house.
“Hold on there, Scarlet, I DO give a damn, and you’ve got to get these plants watered. You’ve torn them from their homes and they’re dying for some water. Their leaves are so shriveled…I can’t even recognize what they were.”
“Oh yeah,I forgot. I’ll squirt them a little. They’ll be fine.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“This is not a Band-Aid problem. This is major open heart surgery time, pal.”
Forty-five minutes later, we had every available plastic tub and five-gallon bucket filled with water, soaking what would pathetically be the ruins of my glorious garden. We dragged them, full of water, out of the hot sun, lugging them to the shade.
It was time to take stock of the situation. Hurricanes hadn’t caused this much chaos. All the years we chastised Hamish for digging in the garden went right out the window! Accessing the damage was painful. I could watch a few hundred more flower shows and line paths with whatever survived, I told myself. Perhaps, I could create Tulipville. Surely he couldn’t blame me for buying a thousand tulip bulbs after this disaster.
I looked down at my mangled family of flowers…anybody else would’ve tossed them in the trash. Not me. They’re not heavy, they’re my flowers. My energy was waning as I tried to make room for one last bucket and sighed. It certainly wasn’t going to be on the cover of any Martha Stewart magazine. Paradise was kaput.
