Coming in from a hard morning's work in the garden to a relaxed half hour with the Wall Street Journal as I eat lunch is a treat. I really enjoy getting my news from the paper instead of the TV. The only complaint I have is that the WSJ, by its very nature, has hardly any articles about gardening. Rarely do I read anything that will help me write a column. A few weeks ago, however, I found a half page article titled "The Concrete Gardener."
By the time I finished reading it my emotions had run the gamut from disgust to hilarity to sadness. What is America coming to? People who prefer a backyard of cement, plastic grass and fake trees to a real lawn and real plants are not gardeners. I think I'll call them backyard boobies. They've taken up a new trend called "hardscaping" as opposed to landscaping. It involves replacing sod with stones or tiles or weatherproof rugs, using lifelike plastic shrubs instead of the real thing, substituting built-in TVs and fancy barbecues for flowers.
Asking these folks to rake leaves, mow a lawn or prune a shrub is like expecting Congress to give up "earmarks". These non-gardeners are spending thousands of dollars to eliminate such chores. Frustrated with Mother Nature's fickle weather, and unwilling to spend a few hours weeding a flower bed, trimming a hedge or watering a thirsty clematis vine, they prefer to spend their weekends relaxing on their cement patios, surrounded by fake flowers.
A businessman in California paid over $25,000. to get rid of every blade of grass in his backyard, pave it over with cream-colored concrete, put in a pool, a covered barbecue and a bar with granite countertops. He now has a maintenance-free property. Instead, that amount of money could have probably supplied him with years and years of a weekly gardener, happy to work and weed and water a beautiful green oasis.
How sad that these backyard boobies obviously find no pleasure in nurturing a garden. Think of what they're missing - the perfume of a real rose bush, the rustle of wind through the leaves of a willow tree or the feel of walking barefoot over a freshly-cut lawn. Gardening renews the spirit, reaching all six of our senses. Smell the first jonquils of the spring; feel that cool dirt between your fingers, watch a bean seed's cotyledons push up into the sunlight; hear the soft buzz of a hummingbird as it darts from one wild columbine to the next, taste the first sun-ripened tomato. And give that sixth sense, your mind, a rest from today's high-tech world.
I don't know any of these "hardscape" gardeners, so there are no photos to decorate this column, just me reading the Wall Street Journal.
