Chapter Ten: Toby and Boscoe get down and dirty in the garden
(This is a recycled story. It ran in the Star Tribune a few years back. I haven't had time to come up with anything new this week.)
The first year it was the fault of the dogs, who trampled everything, and the second year it was the fault of the hollyhocks, who took over, but this year if I fail again to have a garden there will be no one to blame but me.
Actually, I do not really have a garden, and this is not just modesty talking. I have a strip of ground in front of the back fence by the alley, in which I try to grow things.
It is embarrassing to be related to people like my father and my little brother and my little sister, all of whom have green thumbs and can do just about anything they want to with their yards. When you understand that my brother and sister have a friendly rivalry about their wisteria plants and I am still trying to master
growing daisies, you will agree that I am completely out of their league.
But I do love flowers, and I admire the gardens in my St. Paul neighborhood, so every year I get all revved up in the spring and vow to grow something in mine. I love the idea of lounging in the Adirondack chair, breathing in the fragrance and beauty of my own flowers in my own yard.
The first year I planted two lilac bushes - one at each end of the fence - and then I was stumped. What should go in between? The best gardens are laid out by people with an eye for design and color and then tended with patience and care. This does not sound like me.
So, instead, I bought "Wildflowers in a Can," which, according to the label, contained enough seeds to cover a football field. But I didn't trust the stuff to grow, so I overcompensated, sprinkling the whole thing, like Parmesan cheese, over the garden plot.
It grew. It all grew, I think, every last seed. By July, the garden was an incredible mess. Nothing had room to flower, so the garden became a mass of weeds poked through by an occasional orange blossom that might be a poppy, or a white thing that could be a straggly daisy. 
But ultimately it didn't matter, on account of the dogs. Every time someone walked through the alley, Toby and Boscoe dashed to the back fence and ran up and down, up and down, trampling everything that might be trying to survive.
"Put up a fence," said my mother, and I didn't, because I thought how odd it would look to run a fence right next to the other fence, as though the garden were in jail. But she was right, of course, because it looked even odder to have a garden that was
nothing but two lilac bushes, dog prints, and a mass of trampled weeds.
So, too late, I installed a little green wire fence, and Boscoe, who is smart, learned to stop short, but Toby, who is adorable but a teensy bit slow, smashed right into it several times before he got used to it being there.
The second year, the fence problem solved, I decided it was time to get serious. I bought six hollyhocks, thinking how pretty the tall pink blossoms would look next to the white picket fence.
In front of them I planted - oh, a lot of higgledy-piggledy stuff that caught my eye at Linder's and Frank's and the Dale Street Greenhouse: Lupines. Shasta daisies. Violets. Petunias. Things that any real gardener will tell you don't go together because some are tall and some are short and unless you plant them in some kind of order, they will look odd.
They looked odd. But fortunately I didn't have to look at them very long because the hollyhocks began to grow. And grow. And man, were they ugly. 
Who knew that their leaves would expand to the size of dinner plates? Who knew that they don't bloom their first year? By July, they had shot up more than 6 feet tall, and spiky, and their enormous elephantine leaves crowded out the lupine and the daisies and the petunias down below.
Now begins the sad garden's third year. Once again, because it's only May, I vow to get serious.
I dug up the hollyhocks and planted them along the side of the house by the hose, where they can't hurt anybody, and when I saw the shasta daisy and the lupines bravely making a comeback, I made a decision: More daisies! More lupines! More perennials! I will load that space with pretty, hardy flowers that come back year after year and I will fence them and every summer from now on I will be able to lounge in the Adirondack chair and enjoy the blooms as the garden does all the work.
It's easy to feel this enthusiastic, of course, because it's only May and the plot is still clear and the plants look manageable and all things seem possible. I am not even going to think about what condition the garden will be in - let alone my state of mind - by July.
