Whether you’re picking up a trowel for the first time or boasting about years of gardening experience, you’ll chuckle as you read this light-hearted account of the author’s trials and joys of landscaping her home.

From renovating the front yard to creating gardens in bright sun or under shady trees, or flat lands or clay slopes, the author presents gardening as an enjoyable, enriching and satisfying game-a game involving chance and knowledge. The more your knowledge grows. The more you chance of success increases.

Forget all that talk about a “green thumb.” What every gardener needs is a sense of humor, though it may be awhile before you are willing to entertain your gardening friends with stories of your experiences. I’m not sure my husband Bob and I thought it was funny when the rhubarb we planted never broke ground, but the piece of a nearby shrub we’d stuck in the ground to mark the spot took root and flourished.  And it took years before we could even mention the cherished dogwood that Bob and a neighbor cut down when they were thinning a border in winter and got a little too enthusiastic.

Eventually, though, we could laugh with other gardeners about our experiences. 

I realized what a difference an attitude makes when I remarked to a friend that her neighbor had a beautiful yard. “Well yes,’ she replied, “ but I see them working out there every day!”  I’m glad she doesn’t live near me because she would be scandalized by the amount of time I spend “working” in my yard.  Only I don’t think of it as work.  It’s more like going out to play. I find it the most enjoyable, enriching, satisfying hobby imaginable.  I love checking on how things are growing, thinking about how to create better arrangements of plants, trying to figure out why one plant is thriving and another is not or deciding whether to try something new.

It isn’t always easy to be philosophical about Mother Nature’s eccentricities. I heard a story about a man who planted an asparagus bed with visions of succulent spears for dinner and lovely plumes when the harvest was finished.  Not a single spear showed up.  He planted again with extra care, but still no sign of asparagus.  In frustration he revised his entire landscaping scheme and paved the area for a driveway.  Asparagus came up through cracks in the blacktop.  I’d be surprised if he was awed by the power of that frail-looking root to pierce asphalt, or was filled with curiosity about the reasons for his failure and ultimate “success.” Let’s hope not all his surprises were so annoying.

My own attitude comes from years of being a hands-on, dig-in-the-dirt, try-it-and-see gardener; I’ve learned a lot from trials that included plenty of errors.  I had gardened in the rich black loam of Iowa, the rocky soil of inland Massachusetts, and the pure sand of Cape Cod; I knew that the acid-loving plants that do well in Massachusetts will not grow in the alkaline soil of the middle west, and vice versa.  Nothing, however, prepared me for gardening in upstate South Carolina where the red clay soil is slicker than grease in wet weather and hard as brick in dry.  It takes a mattock to dig a hole--literally. I paid a price for not learning more about gardening here to start with.

My first mistake was trying to save half a dozen native dogwoods that grew in the ideal spot for the house Bob and I planned to build. It’s a given that whatever attracted you to the lot in the first place is going to be destroyed by the building process.  What I overlooked was the fact that here dogwoods are practically weed trees; later we counted a hundred of them on our five acres. I knew that transplanting such large trees wouldn’t be a sure thing, but when one of the workmen proposed attempting it with his front-end loader I was eager to try.  He dug adequate holes and worked carefully.  It was the right time of year for transplanting and I watered faithfully, but gradually over a year’s time every tree died. I had grossly miscalculated the extent of a mature tree’s roots.