Confessions of a Nongardener

Anticipations of spring, for me, don't truly come with anticipations of gardening, alas. I'm a gardener-wanna-be, perhaps too lazy-daisical for the true thrill of gardening. And that's a good thing, because if I was a gardener, after 30 years of living here, I'd be an extremely frustrated individual. Or perhaps I'd have mastered this inhospitable habitat, and would be the most sought-after expert in the field of Xeriscape®* gardening. Fortunately, I am neither.

Laziness, it seems, applies not only to my approach to gardening, but to my blogging! Very soon now, a new edition of Berry-Go-Round will be posted here at Foothills Fancies. Rather than creating a new post for my contribution, I'll be recycling one of my essays that outlines what I think is a very creative approach to gardening. It's posted over on Small Wonders**, where longer stories go. Unless you're completely committed to the hard labor approach, you might want to check it out.

*Xeriscape® is a registered trademark of Denver Water, who coined the phrase in the late 1970s.^a It is, wikipedia tells us, a portmanteau^b made from "xeri" (dry) and "scape" (from landscape).

^aThe URL "xeriscape.org" now goes to "Colorado Waterwise," which wasn't delivering Xeriscape information for me earlier but seems to be fine now.

^bAs defined by Humpty Dumpty, this is when "there are two meanings packed up into one word," which happens a lot in Jabberwocky, the poem he's explaining to Alice.<sup>c

c</sup> My goodness, it's amazing the things you can find on the web!

**When I started Foothills Fancies, my hope was it would keep my writing skills exercised. Small Wonders includes essays I wrote in the mid-1990s (and was paid for, speaking of small wonders!) that represent my only real body of creative work in the world of publishing. The essay linked here for BGR is one of the few that actually got me a response from a reader—she sent me some plum seeds!