Catching Up

I feel as if I have some catching up to do…then, I remind myself that one of the joys of blogging is not having constraints. You do what you want to do when you want to do it.

I happened across Kim's aka Blackswamp_Girl’s post on Not In My Garden. Quite clever and interesting (Love your new header, btw!). It reminded me a bit of the phases one goes through in gardening which I wrote some about here. Not exactly, you understand, but the whole idea of what one wants and doesn’t want is a changing process. Things you thought you’d never like, a few years down the road become appealing…and things you thought you’d always like become uninteresting. That’s life.

I do appreciate the mention. I’m always happy to find someone has included me or linked me or whatever. Funny, though, while I am unabashedly a daylily enthusiast, it, too, is a learning process for me. I am enjoying the journey. Daylilies, for me, are like surprise packages…never the same, endless possibilities…and, at this point and time, they hold my interest. If you were to walk around my garden with me (ignoring the weeds, naturally), you might be surprised to learn that there are many things here besides daylilies. Some represent different phases of gardening interest, some remind me of travels and events, and some are just whims.

It amuses me a bit that the wandering salesperson or campaign volunteer or whatever-reason-one-might-ring-a-doorbell-person, just about always will ask me the question: What are all the tags for? Note, they are not visible from the street, for the most part….you have to come inside my yard (that gardening in thing). Most are not familiar with daylilies on a scale of this magnitude but just about everyone understands collecting with a passion.

As for me and my gardening phases, I have certainly felt changes in the last few years. This year, I made very few of my garden expeditions to nurseries here and there. I’m out of room, for the most part, but have found that I don’t have a lot of wants, plant-wise, anymore. I mean, I can still be tempted, but I’m better (ha) at resisting. I like the whole shopping and buying thing, but don’t like the sitting-in-the-shady-pot-ghetto-all-summer and then finding more than a few have not appreciated that. I mean to get to them. Somehow, time gets away from me and I get to this point where it is a race to get them into the ground (no longer in fighting form after their long summer) because the whole storing them in the garage thing just doesn’t work for most.

With the drought, it seems pointless to buy plants (except daylilies…okay, most of those have been in the works for quite a while)…it’s enough of a job to try to keep watered (by hand) those that aren’t established. Fortunately, most (not all) of the established plants seem to be hanging on through this extreme lack of rain.

But, back to the point. (I know, you wonder, does she really have one?) I don’t really look at plants, plantings, gardens, etc. with the same eye I used to. There was a time when I would zero in on the unusual, odd, new or just plain different plant and think “I’ve got to have one.”….and, in most cases, I got it. I didn’t really care if it wasn’t exactly suited to my environment, I just wanted the pleasure of growing (or trying ) it. Jokingly, I have called various gardens of mine, “The Test Gardens” because I didn’t really know if what I planted would make it. I learned a great deal that way. I think I liked challenges.

Now, (here it comes) I don’t really look at things with an eye of “Not in my Garden”. I just appreciate it or them for what it is. Interesting. Clever. Wild. Spectacular. Peaceful. Unusual. Whimsical. Hard-to-care-for (the Better You Than Me category). It’s just pleasurable to experience it. I now know that I probably will never have a Japanese Garden (like Kim), but I enjoy very much visiting one.

I think I can thank Felder Rushing for some part in my evolvement. I laughed so much during his talk (which I wrote about here)…and I appreciated the things he showed without having to experience it myself. Which I kinda think is the essence of Kim’s post. She can experience and appreciate others’ choices without having to have them herself. And vice versa. That's major...actually, a really nice phase to be in! I’m just saying that, for me, I have learned to never say never.

*****

More tomorrow. Really.