Landscaped back yard not worth dirty hands

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Al was on his roof Tuesday morning, broom in hand, sweeping. Al, my across-the-street neighbor, is hardly a spring chicken. He should not be climbing ladders. He especially should not be climbing a ladder onto his roof because it is the kind of roof a child draws, a steep upside down V.

But there he was climbing, then crawling like a crayfish, standing intermittently to out-out-damn-spot, some spot only he could see. Who, in his right mind, sweeps his roof?

In fact, I shouldn't have been surprised to see Al above the trees playing dust buster. Al is always cleaning something - the driveway, his car, his lawnmower. I borrowed his mower a few years ago. There it was tucked in a corner of his immaculate garage, not a spot of dirt, not a blade of grass on it.

"Is it new?" I asked, struck by the gleam of the thing.

"No, no. It's old. I've had it for years."

"It doesn't look old. Why is it so clean?"

"It's not that clean," Al said. "I just hose it down after I cut the grass."

Hose it down? Is this another thing that people do? Is this what you're supposed to do? I didn't even know that lawnmowers could get wet.

Al's wife is as neat as Al. She has a perennial garden and potted plants everywhere, inside and out, and her kitchen floor is shinier than my kitchen table. She sews and her sewing room isn't a mess. She reads, but her books aren't all over the place. Every time I walk across the street, I come home and look at my books on the floor, and my plants growing browner by the day, and my deck bereft of flowers and my garage, a catchall for everything but a car. And I think I am going to turn over a new leaf. I am going to pick up and put away and plant and prune and maybe not sweep the roof, but at least sweep the patio.

But I give up before I start.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were in Connecticut at a friend's house. When we first met these friends, they had a huge, sprawling, grassy back yard. Now half of it is a garden, not a few annuals planted just to break up an expanse of green, but hardy perennials, landscaped, planned, something blue and tall here, something yellow and full there, the whole thing right out of House Beautiful.

A flagstone walk leads down to the garden. A rail fence gives it its borders. In the middle is a smaller garden surrounded by crushed stone. Everywhere you look, everything is edged and pruned and mulched and perfect. Judy did all this - after work and on weekends.

I watched this garden grow. I saw how she added a little more every year. She continues to add and subtract, and water and weed, and plan and then change her plans. I came home from her house with visions of bluebells and bachelor buttons dancing in my head. I could do this. I could transform my mishmash of a garden into something, not as grand as Judy's, but into something that was at least pretty.

I e-mailed Judy. I asked what kind of plants I should get for my deck, which has full sun all day. I figured I should start with the deck, with planters, with something easy. Judy e-mailed right back: "With full sun, your choices are unlimited! Why don't you try to find some tallish plants for the centers of your planters, like heliotrope, and then some cascading plants around the side, like bocoppa, etc. The best thing to do is to try to decide on a color scheme and then take it from there. Sounds like a fun project."

But that's the hitch. It doesn't sound like a fun project to me. It sounds like work. I want to look at flowers. I want to gaze at a beautiful garden. I want to be able to walk outside and cut fresh flowers for my table. But I don't want to do the legwork or the arm work or even the mental work. I don't want to have to decide which flowers to plant where and where to buy them and whether or not I am overwatering or underwatering them.

Last year, after I killed too many hanging plants, I went out and bought a fake one. From the road, it looked real. This year, I put fake flowers in my wheelbarrow. From where I sit looking at them, they don't look half-bad.

I figure that as long as Al is across the street standing on his roof, defying age and gravity, no one will notice the bountiful garden that I do not have. .