Gardening, said my daughter, cannot be called a creative or green pursuit.

My eyebrows went up, and she explained.

Gardening seems to be as much about exclusion as about inclusion. Even while you want certain grasses, certain plants, certain flowers, you are always doing your best to NOT have certain grasses, certain plants, certain flowers. The process of murdering all these is called weeding.

Then the whole problem of insects. I too noticed, while on a visit to the hardware store that the summer season has brought with it a full complement of insect poisons as well as weed-killers….

Anjana told me how she had been speaking to a lady who had a very beautiful garden, and who seemed gentle and loving towards her plants…UNTIL she came to the subject of deer which visited her garden. Anjana said this lady had a lot of choice words to describe the pests which came and ate up her best and most expensive plants, and was ready to disembowel these animals and eat them whole! She said the Jekyll-and-

The same would probably go for moles, possums, rabbits, and seed-eating birds, too!

A’s neighbour and I were admiring her garden, and she said, “I just love Nature!” and a little later, when I observed that the large tree in the house opposite was shedding a lot of seeds, she said, “That tree’s got to be cut down!”

And it can be very frustrating to see fungus on your plants, your lawn withering away and not growing lush and green, and your flowering plants with aphids on them… indeed, rather than relaxing one, it can mean a lot of frustration, especially if one adds that wonderful Saturday ritual os suburban America, the mowing of the lawn in the heat and humidity!

So…I think I would agee with A’s view that gardening need not necessarily be a great hobby…!

Update…as we were driving somewhere, we saw a van with “Critter Control” painted on it…the list of “critters” to be controlled was (no, I didn’t have MLC2 with me):

Possum,Raccoon,Geese,Moles,Bees,Skunk,Deer,Rabbits,Wasps…oh wait, I googled them up…

their website

gives a list (only vertebrates in this list)

“We can handle the animal control of rats, snakes, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, rodents, bats, moles, coyote, foxes, and birds.”

Add to this, the notice that I saw in Forest Park (put up by birders, mind you!) where house sparrows and starlings were listed as pests and destruction of their nests is encouraged.

One man’s wildlife is another man’s pest…reminds me of the amateur naturalists who waxed lyrical over the “social behaviour of the macaques” when they observed the monkeys in the forest, but screamed for them to be killed when they raided the aforesaid naturalists’s kitchens!