Secret 2 - Mother Nature I Am Not

I love walking thru gorgeous flower gardens. One of my favorite places to go is the Missouri Botanical Gardens. There are different types of gardens to explore like the Japanese Gardens, the Climatron (my personal favorite), even a maze in which to get lost. I also love walking thru my neighbors yards because many of them have waterfalls or rock gardens, or just tons of flowers. They all spend hours making their yards beautiful and something to be proud of. They plant pansies and orchids, they groom their rose bushes, pull the weeds, feed the geraniums. I envy the look of their property.

As much as I love looking at the beautiful landscaping, I hate taking care of my own. I just don't enjoy digging in the dirt, pulling weeds, waging war against aphids and beetles. My mother used to talk about her mothers flowers and how gorgeous they were...but I don't really remember many flowers around our own house. She mainly talked about her moms African violets. Apparently my grandma was a whiz growing them. I figured maybe I'd have the knack too.

I was wrong.

Here is my latest African violet. Not very pretty, but not dead yet. I thought about sharing my wine with  this little violet, but I figured I'd just drink it instead.

The amazing thing is the fact that I can grow weeds like nobody's business:

Crap.