I just had my eleventy-first visitor to my site since I got a new counter!!! Yay! Too bad I can't pinpoint you. I'll eat your cookie in your honour.

The road goes ever on...

I've always been very much my mother's daughter. It goes far beyond appearances and simple interests, though. But that's not what I've found especially interesting today. I've been mulling over one of our trivial divergences: our views on, of all subjects, gardening.

While it may seem mundane to most, one of my mother's passions is gardening. Nothing restores her like playing in the dirt with a cup of tea at her side. Such is the satisfaction that I get from finishing a good book, or from polishing off that piece of writing I've been working on. Gardening? I just can't seem to get into it the way she does.

I tried. When I was younger. But I could never bring myself to do the weeding and the thinning out of plants overgrown. Me, I prefer to plant and let things be. Sure, part of what drives that impulse must be that I'm prissier than my mother--I hate dirt under my finger nails and the feeling of dried sweat on the back of my neck. But I think that impulse is driven even more so by the fact that I can't stand to see any living thing go to waste. Weed or no, I'm content to let any plant live (yes, even dandelions--I get that from my mother!)

I love gardens, I do. But I love them best when they are untamed, so it stands to reason that I can't bear to interrupt their course. Besides, as I pointed out to my mom tonight while helping her with her gardening (no weeding on my part--I collected the the uprooted plants for the composter), Mother Nature's a much better gardener than I ever could be.

"Mother Nature lets her plants strangle one another," replied my mother--without missing a beat--as she thinned out her own plants.

While she may be right about Mother Nature, I still refuse to uproot weed, flower, shrub or tree.

I'm going to be one of those crazies who drives down her neighbours' property values when I grow up. When I have my own home, in place of a grassy front lawn, I'll have a field of wild flowers and grasses. And ivy! Oh, the ivies! (I've never met an ivy I didn't like!) And I'll let all of them alone to grow and seed as they wish. I'll be the Divine Clockmaker of gardeners.

And every morning, before I sit at my desk to write, I'll walk through my garden with a cup of tea in one hand and a cat on my hip, admiring the flowers as my mother has done before me.