Garden Warrior

As I have mentioned, I live in a suburban neighborhood. All of the streets have sidewalks and most are lined with trees. Most yards are modest and landscaped with a few shrubs, a maple or two, and the average cast of annuals in the summer.

I've also noticed that most yards (that are well kept anyway) come with a gardener. This does not mean that every home hires out for a landscaper and gardener to tend their lawn (though many do on the richer side of town), but it does mean that in most households there is one person who does the gardening.

I am that person, and I contracted the urge to garden from my mother, a self-professed garden-warrior. To clarify, there are many classifications of gardeners. For instance, down the block the "Crazy Azalea Man" resides. His house is literally surrounded by azaleas and rhodedendrons in pinks and purples and whites and even orange. This elderly gentleman (easily in his 80s) comes out with pruners and carefully prunes the individual branches. He has each plant labeled with Genus and species. This is the meticulous type, careful and... well, pleasantly retired.

There is also the housewife variety. These are the women who don their wide-brimmed sun hats, their patterned gardening gloves, their cute white keds, and their little kneeling pad. They have a little garden cart with cute little hand trowels and their husbands teeter out to fill up their lemonade glass with a gleaming smile. Some are just happy to plant their petunias, but some are just as knowledgeable as "Crazy Azalea Man" and will in retirement take up similar habits. Many may already be studying Latin names of their shrubbery.

As I was saying, I've inherited the garden warrior gene from my mother. We don't wear gloves, and only occasionally use little hand trowels, usually opting for a heavy spade. When we go out to garden, we wear gardening clothes that consist of previously ripped garments, throw our hair back in a bandana or a headband and refuse to wear makeup. If we don't like a bed, we change it, mold it, destroy it, remake it. My mother is notorious for deciding to move entire shrubberies, hacking it down to a nub, digging it out with an iron, hauling it across her backyard, and placing it somewhere more appropriate. She's also notorious for busting out the chainsaw whenever someone mentions they don't like the shape of a tree.

Though I don't wield a chainsaw, I share her outlook on gardening and I decided to mulch for two days straight. I wore the rattiest jeans in the closet, a tank top for a tan. I tied my hair back in a bandana, and wore the mulch dust and dirt caked in a sweaty film like war paint. I edged the gardens with the spade, heaving the shovel into the turn and ripping out the sod that grew too close to the beds. I weeded them like an assassin, with a quick rip at all offenders, and busting out the trowel for the particularly nasty ones. Then, I dragged mulch from one corner of the yard to another with a tarp and a shovel. I used my bare hands to spread it in the garden beds and when I ran out of mulch, I wiped a damp rag on my face and went out to the home improvement center to get more. Yes. You've probably seen these gardening warriors, or at least sensed their smell with some sort of disgust dismissing them as landscapers, but we do exist. And, believe it or not, we usually know what we're talking about if you can't find a customer service representative.

And when we're done with our projects, moving shrubs, mulching, cutting down trees, we don't relax with a glass of lemonade. We generally opt for a beer.