Garden Pride: Is it a Sin?

Starting with nothing but square yard lined with arborvitae, we headed toward our July wedding and summer BBQ season with a vision: flowering madness and food to eat. Despite our March snow and cold June, with the help of professionally grown starts, we’re now able to sit back and watch the hummingbirds, bees, and all sorts of bugs hover over our ecolawn, our flower borders and through our food.

I have a serious case of Garden Pride.

Sure, there’s some first year missteps: The clarkia is the wrong color, I should have pulled the frost damaged plants sooner, the East-facing front yard gets much more sun than many of the plants we started with there want.

But overall, the exuberant feel of the garden matches our house, the raised curving mounds work exactly like I thought they would giving definition to our new ecolawn and fruit trees, and many of the color and texture combinations are inspired.

Our water bill is going to be outrageous as we try to get all the shrubs established. It’s unlikely we’ll have this many flowers in futures seasons as the trees and shrubs grow and create more shade and height, but for now, I am madly in love with sitting on our deck and looking.

We made a post-wedding promise that we’d not embrace any more garden projects this summer, so our deck will likely stay hot without an awning and our picket fence and our “Dream of France” seating area won’t likely get finished until the fall, but that’s just fine. There’s plenty to do tending the vegetable patch and keeping it moist.

Now back to a glass of wine and looking at it.