SEEDS & WEEDS: The Funniest Things People Have Said About GARDENING

THE FUNNIEST THINGS PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT GARDENING 125
and uniformity in all things, including your flowers, which are carefully
lined up around flagpoles and patio edges and never vary in color or kind
from year to year. Your backyard vegetables consist of two neatly staked
hybrid tomato plants, whose yield you dutifully put by every fall in the
form of relishes, chutneys, and jellies, which you give as Christmas
presents in Williams-Sonoma catalog jars with preprinted “Specially
Grown By” labels embossed on the tops. While one might see an
occasional white iron bench reposing alongside your azaleas, you would
never stick inspiring statuettes or wooden anatomical effigies in your
yard, mainly because your Neighborhood Landscaping Committee would
have your real anatomicals on a platter if you even joked about doing such
a thing.
You adore, and are in fact required to have, a bright green, uniformly
weedless, totally chemicalized front lawn.
200–300: AMERICAN GOTHIC — You enjoy colorful landscaping
featuring old toilets and blue tractor tires with petunias growing out of
them, and other interesting lawn decorations made from recycled
materials such as bus seats and/or plumbing. Your vegetable garden
consists of tomatoes stuck in black plastic kettles, runner beans crawling
up the rainspouts, and blistering hot little peppers hilariously destined to
incinerate everyone’s digestive tract at the annual firehouse Chili Wars
this summer. You own enormous over-financed pickup trucks that have