My heart beats a cha-cha after a few moments in the garden.  Two steps back, one step forward, swing those hips, and pivot…

Watering plants and watching the arc of water make rainbows in the bright sun.  Tending the flowers.  Vegetables are too worthy, too practical, too real word for my idea of gardening.

I want the Secret Garden with a secret door.  I want lush, verdant, and bursting with flowering shrubs, vines, and plants. Irish moss.  I want fragrance and the hum of happy bees.

I want to cha-cha with the watering can.

A dreamscape.  An escape from the real world behind my morning glory covered garden gate where the Mock Orange scents the hair this time of year.

Mid-June the garden peaks.  After that, I pretty much just rely on annuals from the garden center.  I’m partial to petunias and bedazzled by begonias and impressed by double impatiens. 

The goal is to fill every nook and cranny with flowers and herbs with a heavy fragrance using the annuals to fill space until I get the garden to that point.

I want grass only on the path that will wind through the garden allowing me access to water – something I can mow in 10 minutes or less.  And I want lush, green Kentucky bluegrass.  I want golf course uniformity and softness.  I want the grass to be as spectacular as the flowers.  But only that little bit of it.  Just enough. 

I want to sit at the glass table with the swivel rocking chairs and drink morning coffee at dawn or a twilight glass of wine with fireflies flitting about.  I want to watch the sun set behind the western edge of the privacy fence as the stars begin to come out. I will light a lantern and watch the moths try to brave its flame.  If I’m lucky, a Luna moth will show up.  My camera is right here.

This is a white garden, for the most part.  Some blue and purple, but mostly white.  I wanted flowers that glowed in the moonlight.  The Japanese climbing hydrangea on the oak tree shimmers in the moonlight – the white blossoms a gift. The white old roses glow and scent the air. 

It is peace and tranquility back here.  I wait for the moonflowers climbing the fence to open.  They are really a spectacle in the light of a full moon.

The garden was almost there….so close and then real life interrupted.  And then the pandemic.  And then long covid.  The garden is a mess, but it’s all still there.  It will take some heavy lifting with a weeding hoe to bring it back and a few hundred dollars in replacement plants and annuals, but it’s only money.  Never mind that I have none.  Somehow it will come to fruition again.

I want to cha-cha to my heartbeat in the garden.  Again.  And again. Forever and ever.  Amen.