Garden-'schmarden' -- I need a nap about now

It happens every year around about the time July segues into August. I always vow that it won’t. Two months ago I recall consciously saying: “This year it ain’t gonna happen, Babe,” or words to that effect. In fact, I’m not alone in this. It happens to both of us about the same time.

What is it?

Garden apathy.

In March and April we plan. With daffodils and tulips already in bloom, as a source of inspiration we steadfastly resolve that this year it will look better than ever. We go so far as to envision a project that will turn our humble residence into even more of a horticultural showplace. Perhaps we’ll get on the tour bus route.

In May and June we go to work. We may even get a new project completed. We have lots of energy and the fact that the garden is coming into its own yet again provides us with added incentive. The lawns are lush and verdant; the roses are coming nicely into bud, disease free. The dogwoods are flowering and the bearded irises are the pieces de resistance in the beds.

Then comes July. What was needed to be done has been done – or not. Well, there’s always next year, we say. Lawn starts to dry out a bit. Oh well, healthier for it to go into hiatus, goes conventional wisdom. Although the major weeding was seen to in June the little bastards persist in coming back, along with the earwigs and slugs and all their nasty herbivorous kin. GA is looming.

The days get long and a bit too warm sometimes to make a body want to muster the energy to get out there and keep those green thumbs from turning completely brown. Too late. By this time of the month the annual apathy has set in. GA has arrived.

Screw the garden, we think. I want to go on vacation. I’m tired of looking at it. I know it needs weeding, much as the roses are screaming for fertilizer, not to mention being stripped of aphids. Oh well, they’ve been around for well more than a decade and haven’t bitten the dust yet. No, they aren’t showcase roses this year. No fanatical garden aficionado is going to have an inadvertent spontaneous orgasm by pondering the petals of our Peace Rose.

Garden apathy tells the home tender that there is always next year. It has all become too familiar. There can be such a thing as an excess of beauty and eventually it becomes tiresome.
“Sorry, honey,” Brad says to Angelina one year. “I know you’re very beautiful, but you have become so damn familiar to me that I just can’t muster the impulse any longer.”

OK, that may be a stretch, but you get my drift.

So, every year by August, the garden becomes a down-at-the-heels Angelina and it warrants only the barest minimum of effort. And such thoughts will likely persist until the seed catalogues arrive in the early spring, and then we can start all over again with renewed enthusiasm.