Time flies when you're making platelets.

For the most part, that is where I have been ~ off building platelets (thank you, God) while trying to think and not think at the same time. It's not as easy as it looks. Still sorting through the weeds in the backyard here (naturally, my mother's taken over so I like to stand back and mostly carry things around, rearranging here and there, and then noticing most things I have rearranged move back to the original location, so it's a never-ending job) and replanting the front yarden in Memphis. It was a flying trip but worth it. The roses hadn't been cut back properly, but four of five bushes are going wild in the face of neglect. Good. Not only did that ease my Garden Guilt over not taking an hour before on other trips to cut them back and shape them, but it also shows me what not to do to make them flourish. Only one bush got spindly and leggy. It was a miniature red rose that I'd planted on a lark, and it grew to epic proportions. I've been half expecting it to exhaust itself and die under its own weight, but as I removed the dead wood and reshaped it, I know it'll regrow itself strong and filled with sweetly scented blooms if I just give it time with itself and the earth.

The boxwood bushes need trimming, but I'll get to the last, I know it. It's funny ~ I'm halfway scared of bushes because you never know what's hiding in them. Garter snakes, a praying mantis or two, and hopefully a garden spider or two. Last year, Yardley showed up. He was a giant yellow and black garden spider. Not huggable, but I grew to love him and respect him, seeing him as a sign of a maturing, established eco-system in a tiny, experimental Yarden. I think Yardley was a "he", but I hope he was a "she". I'd like to see a baby Yardley or two.

Two or three years ago, I got tired of looking across the street at the friendly metrosexual's ever-changing landscape. I turned various shades of green with friendly heterosexual envy. "Man. Look at that tree...I don't know what it is, but I want one." All I had was the short, scraggly oak tree that was full of promise but lacking in overall pizazz. "You don't flower, do you?"I asked. It didn't answer, so I took that as a "no." My mom always said, "Flowers you plant for yourself. Trees you plant for other people ten years down the road." Tell that to the friendly metrosexual across the street secretly driving me crazy with his willows and flowering whatnots.

Even though I felt back about having the sad little oak axed, I picked out the prettiest flowering tree I could afford at the nursery, one that would to well in the sandy-soil of the Yarden. Really, I wanted a red Japanese maple, but they can't take full sun, so I read and heard. Instead I chose a snowgoose cherry tree and had the professionals amend the soil and plant it. Rest in peace, tiny oak, but the snowgoose cherry? It had to be done.

Every year the snowgoose does its thing, exploding with thousands of fluffy clumps of tiny white flowers, centered with bright yellow, all on a background of that fresh neon spring-green before the first good rain in late March knocks them all to the ground. Instead of letting the grass regrow over the roots around the base of the snowgoose, I've always liked digging a small rounded flowerbed there, trying different plants that like full- to partial-sun. Pansies and petunias work great any time of the year they are planted. When I see pansies poking their faces through a late winter snowfall around the snowgoose, I can't imagine why anyone would call someone lacking courage "a pansy." There's a bully's mind for you ~ shallow as a piepan.

I still know less about them than I did when I planted them, but I knew absolutely nothing about carnations when I planted them as edging around the outside rim of the tiny, round flowerbed. But they have lasted for two years now, producing at least two good batches of spice-scented bouquets of pinks, reds, and whites. Knowing even less about tulips, one year I even tried tulip bulbs in the little round bed, not knowing whether they'd grow at all, but they did. They grew up and flowered around Valentine's Day. A few of them actually wintered over this year and came up this Valentine's Day. That's what I like about planting bulbs ~ in my case, I forget about them until they grow back, defeating the odds most always.

Over the winter and early spring, the ring of carnations had grown thick on one side and lopsided and weedy on the other. The ground-feeding birds, my favorite trio of mouring doves, squashed the life out of the smaller, struggling plants, too. But as everyone knows for a fact, if you don't feed the birds, St. Francis will give you a pox of cold sores. Or is it ringworms? Well. it's something like that. Sure. It may not be true, but I'm not taking any chances.

A giant wadding of healthy-yet-sad carnation plants are budding fiercely, leaning toward the west as the others are dying out under the true north shade. In the end, they will all have to be replaced, but I will try to transplant some of the healthier ones to the other flowerbeds and see if they take. I can't cut back flowers that are on the verge of blooming, however moth-eaten they look from the street. (Take that, friendly metrosexual.) The challenge is now finding something small, affordable, and medium to dark green, preferably non-flowering, to replace the carnations as edging. "Mondo grass," my mom said. "Also, I don't want the word 'mondo' in it." It has to be small and manageable. That is the way I like it.

Oh yeah, and cheap.

So as a affordable attempt at the redo, I planted a ring of powdery white dusty millers close to the base of the tree, with a ring of orange and yellow french marigolds and lacey carmine petunias mixed in for variety. So besides the edging, I'm now looking for *something blue or purple besides a pansy or petunia, just for the heck of it* to mix around in the bare spots and borders, but I can't think of anything yet... Anyway, it should take the carnations a week or two to bloom out, so I can cut them and spruce up the inside of the house for a couple of weeks.

Anyway, for once in my life I can say my little Yarden looks the best on the block.

Sure, I'd like to think it's raw talent, but really, it's only because no one on my block plants flowers but me. I know. There goes the neighborhood, right? I don't understand people who don't want to plant flowers.

Well, my yard looks almost as good as the friendly metrosexual's yard anyway. But lately, his yard has been slipping a bit, so I'm not convinced he hasn't moved. Well, alright. If so, thank you friendly metrosexual, for opening my eyes to the endless possibilities of simple beautification with anything green and blooming, plus the friendly competition of a small Yardening. Even without the disposable income you obviously had, I hope I gave you a run for the money. Thank you for the inspiration, wherever you are. And wherever you are, please don't tell me. Because I'm on a budget always.

But I can't trade being outside, dreaming away over perennials and annuals. for slaving away indoors for someone else's temporary and monetary dreams. Violets and roses, that's all I think about all day anyway...

Hey, that's it! Violets, or violas ~ the purple ones, or blue and white. Flowerbed, done. Now, the edging...

So that's where I have been. Stringing lines back and forth between here and Memphis and trying not to feel like an egg with a cracked shell, but more like a wobbly bird just big enough to jump out onto a thin, springy snowgoose branch, seeing the blue sky above but keeping her eye on the cat on the ground. The weather has been so nice the past few weeks that I can't stay indoors however hard I try, knowing that the indoors turns a soul into muck instead of...mulch?

Ew. See? Time for everybody to go back outside. Personally, I'm not quite de-mucked yet.

But you just wait until it's hotter than as Hades outside, complete with those evil dive-bombing bugs and West-Niler type mosquitos who drink citronella for a good buzz. They spritz with DDT. They floss with cat's whiskers.