A Girl's (Boy's) Garden

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself, And he said, "Why not?"


The previous text is an excerpt from "A Girl's Garden" by Robert Frost, from the volume A Mountain Interval, first published in 1916. Today I planted my first flower garden. Trust me, I know precious little about plants, but I'm going to try to learn. A few weeks ago, we received (or I should say the previous owners of our house received) in the mail a catalog from Springhill Nursery. We thought it would be nice to have some color in the front of our house, so we browsed the catalog and selected flowers that supposedly do well in our climate and are fit for abundant sunshine, that will bloom from June until frost.

For the record, we planted Super Shasta Daisy, Little Business Daylily, Wonder of Staffa Aster, Rudbeckia Toto, Isaac House Hybrid Scabiosa and Pink Coreopsis. It's my understanding that deer tend to avoid most of these, so hopefully the critters won't get to them. The catalog also stated that some even attract butterflies.

Perhaps some of our friends and family (Aunt Pam) can help us with some growing tips. I absolutely want to avoid using nasty chemicals (if one can't pronounce it, one shouldn't be using it). But, by the same token I want to make sure I feed them properly (I already sang to them as I placed them in the ground). I look forward to what God will teach me through the process of planting and nurturing these flowers; I'm sure there are life lessons there. The girl in the poem ended up with "a little bit of everything and a great deal of none". I'm hoping we'll get a color splash of white, pink, blue, red, yellow and lavender.

Love to you from Kennesaw...