The adoptive gardener

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 13, 2002

Mature plants from the garden center may give us instant landscape, but there's something about pressing a seed into soil and seeing a plant emerge that satisfies.

The Instant Garden is something I ponder as I wander the aisles of Home Depot on a Saturday morning.

The idea has stuck in my mind ever since St. Petersburg Times food critic Chris Sherman stopped by my desk a few days ago with a column written by Michael Leapman of the London Daily Mail that bemoaned our current propensity for gardening "as an end result rather than the process of achieving it."

The guy has a point.

Almost everything in my garden was purchased in varying stages of horticultural maturity. The annuals were adolescents, the perennials teenagers and the trees young adults when they came to live with me. That makes me . . . what? An adoptive gardener?

There are exactly two examples in my yard of plants I have grown from seed: tomatoes and lettuce. They took forever to come out of the ground, but now that the fruit is ripening to red and the lettuce leaves are bursting from their pots, I dote on them like an obnoxious parent. I care about their success far more than about any other plants in my yard.

I present a bunch of greens swaddled in towels to a friend and say, "My lettuce."

I tote the first ripened cherry tomato around in my pocket as if it were a kangaroo kid, then show it to my 17-year-old daughter and say, "My first tomato."

The basil, which I bought as a bushy plant that now, with Osmocote, has become bushier, should be as cherished. Yet I hack away at it as if slaughtering the innocents. I have difficulty eating the tomato.

A lot of plants are not usually grown from seed, of course. Roses come to mind. All the plants I group loosely into the category of "shrubs." And trees, unless you have, as poet Andrew Marvell observed, world enough and time. But most of the plants that give our gardens their individual character and provide us with food or pleasure can be grown from seeds.

And the variety! From catalogs and local displays, I can buy packets of seeds for more than three dozen kinds of sunflowers that will make an interesting summer border of varying heights and colors, all within one flower family. From past experience, I predict I will find only a few sunflower types as established plants -- if that -- come June.

In defense of myself and other adoptive gardeners, most local businesses carry few seeds for sale and for obvious reasons. More money changes hands when we buy plants that need lots of top soil, mulch and food right away. In defense of garden centers, they are only giving us what we've asked for. In this scenario, it seems, everybody wins. Yet I can't shake a sense of loss.

And so I stand, conflicted. I weigh the fragile specks of possibility in paper envelopes against the strapping plants in gallon containers that stand ready to become a garden in one day.

I recall the garden that took seven days.

I go home and tuck cosmos and zinnia seeds into their dark beds.

I can wait.

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