How does your garden grow?

English as a Second Language What do you want to talk about?
1

It is in Voltaire’s Candide that we learn the moral that we should cultivate our own garden and not be concerned about other people’s. How do you feel about this thought? As a diversion while this question hangs in the air I humbly submit some photos of my garden, a refuge from the hazards of the forum!

Alan

2

Your garden looks lovely, Alan! I wish mine was half as lush and healthy. Maybe my fingers are not green enough? OK, I’ll admit (probably for the first time) that I’m not so passionate about gardening. Besides, the drought doesn’t help much, either – and it’s too hot to really enjoy the garden, let alone work in it.

Your question is a bit too deep for me at such a late hour! It reminds me of a French saying: “Mind your onions”. All I can say is that the world would be a better place if everybody did that.

We had to read Candide at school, but I can’t remember a word of it :oops: !

3

My mother was a very avid, skillful gardener, having learned gardening from childhood. She freely shared all her gardening knowledge with anyone who needed it, including my nextdoor neighbor, but she never taught me. Now my nextdoor neighbor – who has the entire day to work on her garden – gets upset because my garden looks terrible. If I ask her for advice, she claims not to know anything. So my mother passed the knowledge on to the neighbor, but the neighbor won’t pass any back to me.

Part of the problem is probably that I love some of the insidious plants that other people try to remove from their yards. We have wild violets in this area that I think are absolutely beautiful, and I let them grow anywhere they want to. Likewise some delicate powder-blue flowers that pop up on their own, and a delicious vegetable called sour grass that most people here consider a weed. Part of my garden has mint growing out of control also.

The neighbor on one side hates anything that’s out of control in her yard, so she doesn’t like those wild plants in my yard. The neighbor on the other side loves those same wild plants, and she transplants some of them from my yard into her own.