ShawneeDispatch.com

“Do you have a green thumb?” asks the question on the Dispatch Web site.

Talk about your rude questions!

Actually, as of the time that I looked at it as I began writing this column, about 60 percent of those brave, foolhardy or dishonest enough to answer claimed to have green thumbs.

I guess I won’t challenge them. Maybe they do. After all, there are quite a few gardens around, so surely someone must know what they’re about, horticulturally speaking.

Sadly, I am not part of that favored class. Such unfortunate plants as find themselves within my care survive, if at all, because of some genetic accident, some reservoir of inner strength that protects them.

I provide a true test of Darwinian principles: Around me, only the fittest survive. If my thumb is any color, figuratively speaking, it’s probably black.

In all honesty, it’s usually not because of anything I do. I think it’s more often because the plant finds within itself the capacity to survive the things I don’t do.

For example, last fall we pruned the roses out back but I never got around to mulching them. The winter just past was not particularly harsh, but we did have a few days with the mercury down around zero, as I recall. I would not have been surprised to find the rose bushes inert and lifeless this spring, yet just in the past week I saw new shoots springing up from the earth.

Then there’s the water lily. A few years ago we put a big water tank on our deck – it’s a 100-gallon horse tank, actually – and fixed it up as a water garden. It’s exactly 24 inches tall and that makes it deep enough for water lilies, so I got one. The water garden freezes over every winter, but somehow the water lily seemed to have survived – until this spring. A couple of times a week I would look over the top: there was no sign of the water lily until just this past week, when a couple of those characteristic leaves found their way to the surface.

While we’re on the subject of the water garden I’ll digress a little to say that the only organisms under my care to have fared worse than plants over the years have been fish.

The first few years we had the water garden I put in a few fish to control the mosquitoes and to provide a little visual interest. To date none has survived to die of old age, whatever that means for a fish. Most of them have gone to supplement the diets of birds or other creatures (I suspect raccoons) in the neighborhood. One, I am ashamed to say, did not survive the winter. My only defense is that I couldn’t see it in there and thought it had already been harvested and so I quit feeding it.

After having such rotten luck with fish – and feeling, I’ll admit it, a little guilty – last year I foreswore the fish. I have to say that I missed them terribly, and so this year I plan to get some more fish, even if that means feeding the birds and raccoons.

Pretty soon, we’ll be putting in the plants on the deck and around the front door. We always have a few culinary herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, to borrow from the song), in addition to the flowers.

A few years ago I tried a couple of those hanging tomato planters, without much success. In retrospect, I decided that my error lie in not feeding the plants often enough, so I probably will try a couple of them again this year. You know what they say about homegrown tomatoes.

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