when we bought this house in the winter of 2008, the whole property was completely barren of flora, save for the gorgeous 100-year oak that towers over the front yard and which i love and i will sell the house if anything ever happens to that tree.
the house was built in 1977, and was owned by the original owners until 2005, when the by-then retired owners decided to downsize. they sold it to a single mother, who married the following year and sold the house to us, since she and her ambiguously gay church choir director new husband wanted something in a newer neighborhood, with a pool.
our neighborhood, having been plotted in the 70s, is just delightful in my opinion. the houses have character and plenty of square footage, and the yards are well maintained. even though it's an older neighborhood, it's not a renter's neighborhood. we know our neighbors, and we love them. it's a quiet place, with brick fireplaces and built-in bookshelves (and olive green toilets, but i've already blogged about that).
but back on topic. somehow during this house's thirty-one year life, no one ever planted a thing. the front flower bed is ENORMOUS, and the most work anyone had ever put into it was to lay down plastic tarp and cover it with white landscaping rocks to ensure that no life ever sprung there.
we bought the house in november and the following spring i watched and waited, expecting bulbs and sprouts and hostas, and not a single one appeared. at first i was annoyed, and then i decided to make the best of this blank slate. i could plant whatever i wanted!
i quickly came to find out that nothing grows here. Jenks is known as River City, and our house lies within the levy. the soil is nothing but hard clay mixed with sand.
determined, i bought 25 pound bags of miracle-gro soil. every time i'd plant an azalea or a holly bush, i'd struggle to dig out thirty years of white landscaping rocks to create a hole double the recommended size and backfill with fresh black soil to give the roots plenty of space to breathe.
which worked beautifully until the gophers discovered the roots. or moles. whatever, makes no difference to me, they eat my plants.
my neighbor across the street is a spry elderly widow who tends her flower beds daily. i am embarassed when she comes into my yard and glances sideways at my patchwork flowerbed, a mixture of healthy plants, empty space, and dead and shriveled losses.
i'm not always sure why some plants die. i planted two azaleas this spring. one is thriving and the other, right next to it, is totally and completely dead. i will never be able to match that azalea. maybe next spring it will bloom and i can cut a limb and take it to the nursery and they can sell me a mate, but i'm not hopeful. there are over 10,000 registered varieties of azalea. and they were planted in a very "symmetrical" area of the flower bed. i guess i can move the surviving sister to the center, but then it will die. what i touch, wilts.
but back to the crape myrtles. my aforementioned gardener neighbor is kind enough to leave "starts" of different plants on my front porch from time to time to help me out. i have a lot of hope in these plants, because if they're growing right across the street then surely they're not going to shrivel up and die the minute they touch my subpar soil. i've had better success with these plants than i have with the "warrantied" ones from the nursery.
a couple of weeks ago, she gave me two large starts of crape myrtle. each one was at least 4 feet tall and would have fetched a good $25-30 at the nursery. the evening she brought them over, i wasn't feeling great and it was already almost dark. i was home by myself with aislinn and by the time i got her into bed i was too worn out to get them into the ground.
so i did something really lazy: i took them into the back yard and i put the roots into the girls' splash pool. i seriously thought they'd be okay.
they were not. the dog dragged them halfway out of their watery retreat and the roots were way overexposed to air by the next evening when i went out to plant them.
and by then they were D-E-A-D. oh, so dead. i watered and pampered and they shriveled up and died. i was so embarrassed.
embarrassed enough that i found myself at lowe's trying to find a replacement crape myrtle to put into the front yard. i didn't want my neighbor to think that i didn't appreciate her generosity (i do). i found an imposter plant and brought it home. i unloaded it into the garage with my groceries that evening.
and then i forgot about it.
i never go into the garage because it is a painful reminder of a half-finished cabinet project that jake keeps harassing me about and which prevents me from parking in the garage. so when i went out there today and saw that dead crape myrtle, i felt so supremely stupid.
does god not want me to have a crape myrtle? does my subconcious not want me to have a crape myrtle? is this some kind of omen?
this i know: i am not planting anything else until next spring. and the first thing i plant is going to be a stinking crape myrtle.
