While I Love Gardening,

I’m thinking:
• I love writing about all things gardening.
• I dislike marketing that uses environmental guilt to coerce me to buy or donate.
• I love a gardener with bad looking fingernails.
• I dislike catalogs that fake their pictures.
• I love a company that practices good customer service.
• I dislike the perfect gardens pictured in home magazines.
• I love a friend’s garden because they’re a part of it all.
• I dislike an insecticide that kills both pests and beneficial insects.
• I love an eclectic garden.
• I dislike garden snobs.
• I love a fresh from-the-garden tomato.
• I dislike garden gloves that get a hole in the finger the second time you wear them.
• I love the smell of lilacs, peonies, and Lily-of-the-Valleys.
• I dislike ice storms.
• I love clouds and snowflakes.
• I dislike garden nurseries that charge too much because they can.
• I love nursery owners who get excited about their plants and having you there.
* I dislike bird seed that absolutely no bird will eat.
• I love free manure.
• I dislike it when my back hurts and I have to quit working for the day.
• I love the garden stuff my kids have given to me.
• I dislike negative talk about gardens and gardeners.
• I love being surprised by something new in the garden.
• I dislike Japanese Beetles.
• I love bees and butterflies.
• I dislike February pretty much all month.
• I love the first time I can sit outside in the spring and soak up the sun.
• I dislike mud.
• I love eating blackberries straight off the bush.
• I dislike it when a favorite garden tool must finally be junked.
• I love walking through your garden and hearing your stories.
• I dislike seasonal allergies.
• I love watching farmers harvest their crops.
• I dislike weeds in my brick walks.
• I love gardeners that would rather have a perfect flower than be perfect themselves.
• I dislike the concept that the only good bird is a pretty bird.
• I love a good garden quote – and with that I’ll end with:

"I think this is what hooks one to gardening:

 it is the closest one can come to being present at creation."

by Phyllis Theroux, contemporary American author.