I don't DO vegetables

I mean grow them. I eat them, though.

I do love to garden, though. Jetty's living art, my sister called it. She said I designed little rooms all over the yard. Yes, that's pretty much the truth. It's the one thing that is intense labor that doesn't kill my back. I don't know why that is; I don't care. When I garden, I constantly shift position. I have a small, light wheelbarrow I can never overload. Same with shovels. I have learned how to lift and it is automatic. There is a rhythm for me and it has become the one dance I've mastered.

But here we get to the core. I do flowers. Shrubs. Decorative container gardens. I don't do vegetables. Not now, not ever. Why? Well, something in me rebels at the practical. I mean, I'll gladly steal, beg, wantonly grovel for the veggies of someone else's labor. But the BUGS. No, really. Bugs like all those nice, juicy things, too. You'd think a gardener would be fine with them, but I'm not. I like a good worm, of course, but they stay put or simply burrow away from me. And honey bees kind of leave you alone in general. Flower garden bugs know civilities. Flies don't care about flowers and I don't know why.

I don't care why. I know only that they don't like my flowers and, when I wear a broad-brimmed hat and a hint of bug repellent, most all of them stay far away from me. My friends tell me to just do tomatoes? Why? I'll take theirs because they always have too many. I do them a favor, really, by eating them.

Besides, we go to flower gardens for respite; to look and to drink in the beauty. We don't go to the vegetable tangle for that. I don't think vegetable garden bugs had mothers. It's flies in your teeth, up your nose, and creeping greenish yucks crawling up your sleeves. Let's face it: no one has to pick little crawly things out of their hair after a little sit-down by the Japanese maple, amidst the hostas and astilbes on a July afternoon. Even cottage garden tumbles are civilized. Nope. Give me the pretty stuff that does nothing but feed my eyes. The worms and birds are happy. So are the bees. That's enough for me.

This is sacrilege I know. Oh, well. There is no symmetry in my plans. No rows. Just rooms that have grown through my twenty years in this house, in this place of peace for me. I had visions at the outset and have seen these visions become real through my small efforts every year, step by step. Through the turmoil of my years, the garden grows in peace. I start new rooms every couple of years, with an eye toward five to ten years down my road, and I hope I travel here long enough to see them to fruition, knowing my vision for them may change along the way.

That's the thing. When the vegetables are eaten, the following year you plant again. It's precise. When you plant flower gardens they are forever evolving, changing, yet offering the stability of the heart's design. My maple was a twig. Now it is as tall as a house, a mass of deeply cut shade and wonder through three seasons. The peonies will outlast my life. There are bits of my mother in the Canterbury bells saved at another friend's house until I could have a garden of my own. The deep blue-green hostas were from slips at my grandmother's cottage in New Hampshire, planted when the cottage was new in the thirties. And all of it my late sister--in my love of asymmetry and knowledge of the power of complementary color.

My flowers offer me the model for my life. Unbalance at first glance, perhaps even a chaotic mess to some. Slow to come to fruition, offering nothing much beyond the colors I've offered and BEEN given. Some years and to some eyes I haven't looked like much, but other years, to other eyes? I have had my seasons; I will have them still.

Leave me to my flowers; join me when you will.
Just remember to bring me your veggies and we'll argue over wine...