I believe I have the qualifications and experience to provide a list of ten clues to determine if you might have an eccentric gardener living next door to you.
Now, don’t spend too much time trying to figure out how I can provide such a list. Just go through the list and answer yes or no about your neighbors.
And as you go through the list, you might also see if any of these ten clues apply to you. If so, you might be that eccentric gardener the other neighbors are talking about.
The list of ten clues to determine if you might have an eccentric gardener living next door, in no particular order…
– She has a set of gardening clogs at every entrance to her house and garage, so that at a moment’s notice, she can be outside in her garden, perhaps to chase a rabbit or scare a squirrel away from her recently germinated green beans.
– When you see her lying on her stomach in the grass, you don’t panic and call for help. You just wait a minute or two, and sure enough, she soon gets up after taking whatever picture of the garden she thought should be taken at ground level.
– She often spends afternoons in the fall sitting on the lawn, jabbing it repeatedly with a long, narrow trowel as she plants another couple hundred bulbs for spring lawn flowers.
– No matter how early you get to the local greenhouse to buy spring violas and pansies, you are never earlier than she is. By the time you think to buy spring flowers, she’s already gotten her flowers, planted them up, and given them individual names. You swear the owner of the greenhouse must call her to let her know they are ready, and it turns out, they do.
– When you see how many gardening tools and hoes she has hanging in her garage, you wonder if she has set up a shop to sell them from home.
– When UPS brings her packages, nine times out of ten they are marked “Live Plants”. The tenth package looks suspiciously like the shape of a hoe.
– She has a truck decorated with bumper stickers with sayings like “#GARDENING”, “Practice random acts of gardening”, and “CROP”.
– Whenever she is outside, she has a holster clipped to her side pocket to hold her pruners.
– You see as much of her backside as her face when she’s outside because she seems to always be leaning over pulling a weed, smelling a flower, or just looking at something in the garden.
And the last clue, at least for now, that you might have an eccentric gardener living next door…
– She always smiles when it rains.
I love this!
I think you qualify. LOL. ~~Dee
Damn skippy to all of the above!
Thank you so much for the laugh. hahaha I think I DO recognize these symptoms/clues. There might be a subset — the eccentric wild gardener. I happen to know 'someone' who meets all these descriptions but also has hair perpetually tangled up in overgrown shrubbery and limbs covered in oozing poison ivy welts.
Great post…..yes, I am guilty as charged. plus, I'm out there photographing things just before it gets dark because flowers look so nice….
Thanks for writing this! It brightened up my afternoon. I esp. relate to the love of rain!
Yes, this is all true around here. Plus you'd neighborhood tells people that you are crazy.
I never thought of myself as an eccentric gardener before. 'Keen' is the word I' d use, although my husband says 'obsessive' is the word I am looking for. But I find that I fit all your criteria, apart from the packages; they are just as likely to be books.
As soon as I saw the title of this post, I wondered if my next door neighbor had written it. As far as laying in the grass taking pictures, well, I once sat on the lawn pointing my camera up at the flag in full view of the neighbor's child. I heard him clearly say "Mommy, why is she sitting on the ground" to which I answered for her by calling over my shoulder "Don't worry Kyle, I'm just taking pictures of my flag". But I'm not sure he was convinced about the "don't worry" part…
Strangely, you don't have "she talks to herself in the garden" (which of course means: she speaks "plant"). Otherwise, green thumbs up!
Wonderful especially the smile…I would add she talks to her garden and all the critter visitors!
I may be the eccentric neighbor! I also talk to the critters and praise the wildflowers, trees and shrubs.