The Gardening Aunt

According to Carol at May Dreams Garden, it is 11 degrees outside with a windchill of minus 7. But despite the cold temperature, it is a beautiful day outside. Bright and sunny.

A day that calls to you to come outside and frolic in the garden, breath in the sunshine, and dream of spring.

My sister, of May Dreams Garden, is a true gardener. She lives, breaths and dreams about gardening. She is the family expert (having claimed all of the green thumb genes from the family gene pool), the on-call expert for everyone she knows, and everyone they know. She is always very generous in sharing her gardening expertise. (Just don't ask her to go to lunch during one of her gardening vacations).

Besides the obvious fact that her thumb is green and mine is brown, we have very different gardening styles.

For one, she hates rabbits because they try to eat everything in her vegetable garden before she gets to harvest it.

We love rabbits.

She keeps an immaculate garden. If you scroll down on this post on her blog, you can see a picture of her garden, ready for fall,

Here is a picture of our garden.

We prefer to wait and do the "fall clean-up" in the spring. That way we can provide all sorts of warm little hiding places for baby bunnies and other critters.

Doesn't this look like the perfect place to sleep this winter and then maybe raise a family in the spring?

Another big difference is that the "gardening sister/aunt" knows the names of every single plant, including their Latin names, genus, species, all that stuff. My kids love to go for nature walks around the neighborhood with the "gardening aunt" and listen to her talk about all the different trees and plants and flowers.

If I take them, the answers to their questions are along the lines of "Hmmmm, I'm not sure," or "Hmmm, I know it's a tree, or maybe a bush - no wait... I think it's a shrub".

Usually, most questions end with the universal answer: "Hmmmm...let's be sure and ask the Gardening Aunt next time we see her."

I've gotten to be pretty good at identifying a weed versus a flower. And I do know this little tree next to the little pond (I dug that one day while Prince Charming was at work. Surprised him for Father's Day, wasn't that sweet?) is a little tulip tree. It was a seedling that just came up.

Had that come up in the Gardening Aunt's flower bed, it would have been yesterday's compost. But, Prince Charming and I decided it was making such a gallant effort to grow, how could we possibly deprive it of the opportunity?

Yes, my sister and I have quite different styles when it comes to gardening and she has an awesome hoe collection... but that's OK. It's one more thing to keep life entertaining and interesting.