Other People’s Flowers
I love them.
I do not have a green thumb. It’s not even faintly chartreuse.
Plants, typically, do not do well around me. (Except for a brief and inexplicable period in my thirties when I maintained seven house plants for a period of about four years. And then they went the way of all plants and died on me.)
Now, this is one of those things that is a mixed blessing.
When you are hopeless at growing things, you get to save a fair amount of money and muscle fatigue by not even attempting it. However, I do think I might look into a small herb garden—and maybe some radishes.
And I would like to have more flowers than I do.
The canna lilies that were here when we bought the house—they seem fairly indestructible. Likewise, there’s a vinca that’s held on rather well.
The redbud tree and the fringe tree both bloom yearly.
I have some crepe myrtles, too, that were here at the start and a couple that I’ve planted that may have made it through the winter.
On the other hand, my carnations croaked, the begonia may be frostbitten, the poinsettias bit the dust along with a couple of other flowering things I tried to grow.
But, the neighbors!
The neighbors have orange blossoms and azaleas and dogwoods and tulip trees and this hedge that’s full of big pink flowers. There are geraniums across the creek and rain trees in the surrounding developments and a bottle brush tree along the road I take for my (with any luck) daily walk.
And here’s the thing about other people’s flowers.
You can look at them and smell them and enjoy them just as much as if they were in your own yard.
So, today, I am thankful for other people’s flowers.
