Dear Hearts and Gentle People

My cousin has a green thumb. Mine is more brownish with little flecks of yellow on it.

I love plants. I always have. I love the way they look, the fact that they produce oxygen inside my house, and for the ones that bloom, the way they smell.

I possess a minimum of horticultural knowledge and, unlike the author Dorothy Parker who, when asked to use a sentence using the word 'horticulture,' said "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think," I do know the meaning of the word. I also know that there are some plants that prefer the outdoors and some that prefer the indoors.

Some prefer direct sunlight, some indirect, and some shade. Some prefer lots of water and some hardly any at all.

All the plants I've ever owned, however, seemed to prefer death. Maybe my reputation as a gardener has preceded me all these years and they all my plants I've purchased made a suicide pact before they ever reached my driveway. Obviously they didn't believe that I really loved them.

And any good nurseryman will tell you that plants need lots of tender loving care. Many suggest you even talk to them. I tried that.

My husband walked in in the middle of a conversation between me and a ficus tree once and had made me an appointment with a shrink within the hour. And the stinking ficus didn't say a single word in my defense.

I have spent a small fortune on shiny, bushy-leafed beauties only to come home and see them droop in desperation the very first time I watered them. "You over-water your plants," my cousin said. "That's as bad as not watering them at all."

"Listen," I told her, "I stick them outside and let the Good Lord water them whenever He pleases. Hey, He did a pretty good job with Eden, didn't He? Surely then he knows when and how much to water my potted ferns!"

Okay, so I'm a bust when it comes to gardening. And it depresses me to no end to visit my cousin's house and see her yard that looks like Callaway Gardens, minus the waterslide. I've never seen so many budding plants and in a thousand different colors. I'll bet she has at least a hundred pots filled with an array of some of the prettiest flowers you've ever seen.

I, on the other hand, have three potted geraniums on my front porch that look like they could use a good anti-depressant. When I brought them home they were beautiful, hot pink blooms were falling all over the pot. I hung them on three chains and watered them. The next day the blooms had fallen off and the leaves at the base of the pots were yellow.

"Fertilizer," my cousin said. "Did you make sure you fertilized them?"

Well, I sort of figured they'd had a little of that at the nursery before I bought them, but I got me a jumbo box of Peter's Special and fed the hungry boogers before they had a chance to lean over the pots and leap to their deaths on the sidewalk below.

My Aunt Eloise gave me one of the prettiest bushes I've ever had in my yard. My dog dug the hole for me and the thing grew like crazy. I called it a popcorn bush but I'm sure that's not its horticultural name. It bloomed without fail every spring for twenty years. Walking out in the front yard one early spring morning a couple of years ago I noticed that my popcorn tree was gone....disappeared, no sign of a leaf, stem, or bud anywhere.

I was stumped but not really that surprised. Plants had been coming and going at my house for as long as I can remember. The mystery was solved when hubby informed me that the popcorn tree's roots were dangerously close to the house and, for some reason, he actually thought this little 5 foot bush was going to crack our foundation and destroy our home. Truth be known, I suspect he had seen me fertilizing it and decided to go ahead and put it out of its misery.

Gardening is hard work people. There's all that weeding to do, and you MUST pull up all the weeds. It's easy to tell the weeds from the things you've planted. The weeds are the plants that are actually growing.

So it's no wonder that lately I've become fond of what I affectionately call "fake-flora," aka silk flowers. They require very little care and do quite well in full shade. I have not had to water them, fertilize them, prune them or, best of all, talk to them. 'Course I wouldn't do that anyway. Why take a chance on ticking them off?

I wish I had the knack of growing things, I really do. We've had vegetable gardens before but they were mostly hubby's domain. I'd love to be able to grow a little window herb garden though. And strawberries. I love strawberries. I tried growing them one year but didn't have much luck. I followed all the rules and was out fertilizing them one day when hubby walked by.

"What 'cha doin'?" he asked.

"I'm putting manure on my strawberries," I said proudly.

"Umm," he said. "I kind of like Cool Whip on mine."

Smart Alec. No wonder I'm a bust at gardening.