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

16 QUIPPERY / SEEDS & WEEDS
• Even when they’ve somehow managed to penetrate the impenetrable
fencing you’ve placed around your Korean lilacs before the frigid
winter, with rabbit pellets evenly distributed on both sides of the
fencing as if the fence did not exist, with no breach in the fencing and
no burrowing beneath it, and with rabbits having thoroughly stripped
the bark from the lower branches, leaving the now naked branches
gleaming like bones in the sunlight and your lilacs surely doomed?
• When you see deer, do marvel at this mythical marvel of grace?
• Even when they’ve levitated over your fence into your yard and are
nonchalantly munching on your apples?
• Are you aware that being an effective gardener requires a level of
knowledge and training equal to becoming a medical doctor?
• Which means knowledge of botany, agronomy, biology, meteorology,
philology, chemistry, and alchemy?
• And Latin?
• As for biology — You don’t want to suffer ridicule for ignorance of the
lodicule. Or be stigmatized for ignorance of the stigma. And when
people ask you questions about anthers — you’d better have anthers.
• And what about the biological reproductive issues? Do you identify
more with the pistil or the stamen? Or perhaps you identify as a trans
plant?