Enjoy Your Garden, And I, My Pot Plants

The best garden is a garden that does not exist. That’s right: give me a twentieth-floor apartment any day, where all I have to deal with is pot plants. I’d skip the pot plants as well if I had my way, but people are so very pushy about that sort of thing. They see your balcony with no pot plants and they start looking at you strangely in the hallways, like you hate all living things and you need tracts passed under your door telling you that trees are our oxygen-factory-friends.

That actually happened. Some blocks of apartments are just weird. But I can handle a few plants; it’s looking after an entire garden that I can’t stand the thought of.

I finally managed to catch Vanessa for coffee the other day- no mean feat, since she’s in the midst of wedding plans- and all she could talk about was how she and Ren are looking for a place with a huge garden, and they just went to get building supplies in Narre Warren for their many garden projects. They basically have their weekends planned out for the first couple of years of their marriage, and I’m sitting there just second-hand dying at the very thought of it. Imagine marrying someone into gardening and pebbles and crushed rock. Imagine BEING that person. I know they’ll have a great time, but I couldn’t help wonder the entire time how we’re friends. Getting dirt under your nails, slaving in the sun…and for what? Making your garden look a bit nicer.

You know, there are gardeners for that sort of thing. If you do things yourself, you rob professionals of the chance to do it for you. There are almost certainly places I can everything I need in Berwick, pavers and aggregate and the likes. They might even deliver. I don’t know, and I never will, because I’m an apartment dweller for life. Just gonna tend to my pot plants, and try not to think about landscaping…ever.

-Julia