Everyday Beauty: Other People's Gardens

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I have garden envy, sometimes.

My husband and I are not gardeners. I have attempted garden beautification a few times, but I never follow through. Anyone (even me) can weed a flower bed, plant some stuff and throw down mulch, but the thing is you also have to stand there and water it each night for a little while, and keep up the weeding and the mulching, and remember to check on the health of those flowers every now and then.

That's the bit I don't do so well.

For a long time when my kids were little I defended myself with "time". "I've got no TIME for gardening!" "Who has TIME for that?" etc.

Now I have the time. But I have found, contrary to what I expected, I prefer to spend that time reading, tooling around on the computer, watching Breaking Bad and playing dumb games on my phone.

Y. is not much better. He has grand plans for vegetable patches and fruit trees (in the FRONT yard of course - he is Greek after all), and every now and then he will do a blitz, attacking overgrown trees, bushes and rockeries and making an impressive improvement in a two day rampage. But again, that tends to be the end of it for six months.

So gardening is not our thing.

In contrast, our next door neighbors have a beautiful garden, with lush soft green grass, pretty flowers, a rosebush hedge and gorgeous little rockeries. Our neighbors across the road have a plainer garden (probably more my style to be honest), which is trim and neat, with soft green grass and tidy green stuff around the edges.

Our kids nag us a lot, to the effect "I wish WE had a pretty garden", and "I wish WE had flowers", and "Why don't WE have a nice garden?". And I tell them, a garden is a lot of work (or money).  You see, the thing that does reduce my envy somewhat is that every second day you can see our neighbors working quite hard in their gardens, mowing, trimming, weeding, mulching and planting. It's a big, ongoing thing.

Once upon a time maintaining a nice garden was part of the deal you accepted when you moved to the suburbs. Saturdays were spent washing and maintaining the car, mowing lawns, scooping up dog poop, raking leaves, sweeping porches, and weeding and trimming the garden. It was part of the package and you had to do it if you didn't want neighbors like my dad talking about your house looking "like a rental property".

These days that social pressure is... well, not gone, but lessened.

Hence, our garden.

But I do enjoy the beauty of my neighbors' gardens, on our walks around the blocks.

Thank you neighbors,
for beautifying our walks.

Next door

This one is from my garden