Got those plants in the ground yet?

That’s what Grandma asks me nearly every week. She’s been asking for five years. “Well, I got those in the ground, but I bought some more.” I know she’s shaking her head incredulously, even though we’re on the phone. “You bought more?”

I’ve been gardening (uh, “yardening”) since we remodeled (uh, “rebuilt”) our house in 2004—which is a whole different sorry blog.

I guess I started my sorry gardener ways when we bought the house in 1996 and my dirt patch suddenly grew from two terra cotta pots on the apartment balcony to five rural acres. The landscaping and herbs so lovingly planted by the previous owners were overgrown and overwhelming and, well, not mine—not planted by me, so I felt more like their caretaker than their choreographer. I spent several years learning and pruning and transplanting and generally making the garden more orderly but somehow less lively.

Then, during the remodel, what was left of the lush beds was unceremoniously bulldozed to dig footings for new walls and trenches for utilities. The yard was destroyed—reduced to tire tracks, rotting straw, and charred burn piles. There was nothing left.

We hired a landscaper to rebuild the yard—but that’s it. I wanted to do the planting myself. This time it would be mine—from the ground up, so to speak—and I certainly didn’t want some landscaper going to a nursery and choosing a truckload of plants for me, at wholesale prices, then having his crew of burly guys with big equipment site them properly and dig the holes properly and fertilize them properly and mulch them properly—all inside of a week—while I stood with my hands in my pockets waiting to write a check. No, I didn’t want that. I wanted the pleasure of doing it myself. And it wasn’t even that big of a check. And I mentioned wholesale prices, right?

So the landscaper hauled in truckloads of rich, dark winter-mix topsoil and built beautifully mounded, deeply mulched—and gloriously empty—beds around the perimeter of the house. I love big beds with soft contours, so when the landscaper drew his line in the sand I moved it further from the house and swooped the edges. “You sure you want such big beds?” he asked. “That’s a lot of planting.” But I had a vision. And enthusiasm. And some money left in the bank.

So I took all of that gusto to the nurseries and started buying plants. A lot of plants. After all, I’d been deprived of gardening for a whole year during construction—and I had a yard full of empty beds to fill. What I didn’t have was a plan much beyond “Ooh. What nice foliage. I’ll take three.” So for the past five years, there’s been a steady rotation of 20-30 plants in my driveway in nursery pots—waiting for their forever home. And I still don’t have a plan much beyond “Gee, I’ve been doing this for years, the yard still looks like crap, and I really should finish.”