When a lady's heart turns to sod

Ah, spring. C’mon, everyone, let’s all take a deep breath and enjoy the fresh air. Ahhhhh. Okay, back to work.

Since I work in the landscape design field, I get a lot of questions about yard work at this time of year. The questions from my colleagues all assume that I have a great big garden full of plants, just like they do. I hate getting into these conversations, because they turn into the type of conversation where the other person gets a horrified look on their face, and you can tell they just want to back away slowly until they are no longer in the same room with me.

This is because we bought a house at the end of last summer, so this is the first opportunity we’ve had to do any work on the yard. And while I totally love our house, it is definitely a fixer-upper. So, conversations tend to go like this:

Co-worker: We spent the weekend planting daisies and tending our precious, precious vegetable plot. What’d you do?

Me: My husband and his friend broke up 500 square feet of asphalt with a jackhammer, and then my dad came over to remove this lean-to which the previous owners used to shelter their ski-doos. We used the extra lumber to keep the barn from falling over. Maybe next week we’ll rent a dumpster to get rid of the debris.

Co-worker: [slowly nods and backs away]

The other type of conversation I have is with people who don’t work in the field. These people confuse “landscape planner” with “master gardener”. I mean, yeah, I know a little bit about gardening, but most of my experience with gardening came from the summer internship I had where I tried to keep a crew of developmentally-disabled adults from pulling up all of the plants in the Ithaca Commons.*

These conversations tend to make me nervous, because people have highly specific questions. Since I don’t really work with plants on a daily basis, my knowledge in that area gets a little rusty. And then, all of a sudden, it’s like I’m taking a pop quiz: Shit! This lady’s asking me about her tansy problem. What the hell is tansy again? Aack! This leaves three possible scenarios:

• I know the answer (this almost never happens, except for this weekend when I successfully identified some Artemisia for my mom).
• I sort of know the answer and give a good bluff, and am then filled with anxiety that I told them wrong and all their plants will die and they will think I’m dumb.
• I have no friggin’ clue. In this case, I say something like, “Really, I do more city planning type stuff… you know, like zoning.” This leads people to think I actually might not be sure what job it is I do, and they think I’m dumb.

Anyway, I would love to discuss this further, but I have to make some calls about a dumpster.

* Ask me about the time someone put bubble bath in the fountain! That was the day I traded in my dignity. Good times.