HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

One of the things I like to do in my spare time is gardening. I'm not very good at it. I seem to lack the requisite green thumb, and because of my fibromyalgia, I'm not very strong anymore. So there's a lot I have to leave to my husband, John. But still, I like puttering around in our yard, planting flowers and trying to make our gardens pretty.

My folks have a massive flower garden in their backyard. But they've now reached the age where all this becoming too much for them to keep up. So they're in the process of scaling back and replacing a lot of their flowers with plants that will be easier for them to care for.

So this weekend, one of the things John and I have done together is to go over to my folks' house to collect a bunch of flowers, which we've now planted in our own gardens. My folks were getting rid of everything from irises to catnip. Since I already had a row of irises started in one of our gardens, I was able to fill that in. So now, the small border garden I began work on a couple of years ago along one section of our fence is looking quite pretty.

Other flowers went into other gardens, and I planted some around the little bridge spanning the small stream that flows into our fish pond, too.

Every year, John and I do a bit more in our gardens, and along with all the trees, our waterfall, stream, and fish pond, our backyard has slowly grown to be a lovely, pleasant haven for us to share. One of the things we especially enjoy is sitting out beneath my large flowering crabapple tree on summer evenings, watching the fireflies dance in the dark. Before coming to America, John had never seen one of these insects, and he's still fascinated by them. Equally beautiful are the big dragonflies that flit around our fish pond.

Every now and then, a snowy egret makes an appearance at our fish pond. Whenever that happens, our fish always go into hiding for a couple of days!

I hope you all have a happy Memorial Day!