Rainbow Thumbs

I come from a family that has thumbs of every colour but green.

At my mother’s house, we were able to decimate a 3 foot cactus that was well-established in about 3 years. How it happened, we don’t know… we all thought cactii were fool-proof, even for us brown-thumbed variety, but apparantely we were wrong.

At my father’s house, we grew a vegetable garden ripe with carrots and beans and many wonderful fresh veggies. But there grew a small clump of swiss chard, and up until just this past year, I thought swiss chard was about 2 inches tall, and bitter-tasting.  Imagine pouring vinegar on a vegetable to make it taste better. Choking down that awful “swiss chard” was one of the worst experiences of my young life.  And more, imagine my surprise to find out this past summer that swiss chard was supposed to be tall, lush, and leafy green!  While my father’s and step-mother’s thumbs weren’t brown, they were perhaps a yellow shade, and far from green! (I still shudder thinking of the yellowed, tiny swiss chard mush we ate years ago.)

So with this background, I was ingrained with a paralyzing fear of all things horticultural. When I moved out of my parents, I never dreamed of owning a plant. I was sure that I’d be able to hear it moan and cry as the curse of my thumbs slowly allowed it to die. Then I got married.

We bought our house, and the gardens were in desperate need to some TLC - but I had no idea where to begin. So I began haphazardly.  While getting my groceries, I picked up some generic bulbs that were “guaranteed to grow” (It said so on the package, so I had to believe it, right?) And they did.  Parrot and Lily Tulips, along with some  Blue Lupines littered the front gardens. Success! This gave me a bit more confidence in gardening.  Then my employer gave me tubers of a Canna Australia. Plant in the spring, and dig up in the fall?  People did that sort of thing?  I had no idea!  So I tried it, and imagine my excitement to see them grow, and then sport flashy salmon flowers as fall began. I was even more excited to dig up the tubers in October to find they have multiplied, which means I’ll have many more this year!  Below are the Cannas, along with Hydrangea, Sundrops and Carnations. With little hope for results, the gardens weren’t planned out for the first attempt, but will benefit from planning this year!

So with this new found confidence, I have done bulb-shopping online this year. Found flowers I’ve never even heard of before - Gaillardias, Scaboisas, Coumbines and Astrantias to name a few. One I’m terribly excited to see is the Candy Lillies - so bright and fancy, they are sure to be a favourite.  (For anyone interested, I bought them at springgarden.ca it’s a Canadian site with reasonable prices and shipping!)  So my foray into gardening has begun, and I will update you with my trials and errors that occur this year.

It seems that I may have a shade of green in these thumbs afterall.