This is a picture of a small rosebush in our back garden. I have been admiring it for the last few days because it is blooming so avidly, with many more blooms at the same time than it has produced during the previous six years. The more I look at it though, the more it occurs to me that it says a lot about me. If you want to play, spend a little time looking at it for clues before you read on.

First off, the weather. As you can see, it’s sunny and dry on the Central Coast. We had a rainy winter and spring, but we are back in paradise now. Our smart speaker predicted no rain for the next ten days this morning, and since we haven’t had any for the last ten, I turned on our Rain Bird. What, me water?

As my heritage-rose-obsessed friend assures me, there is nothing special about this rosebush. It’s not even native to our area. For the most part, we have accepted what was present in our small garden and been thrilled that neglect can’t kill plants in this climate. Besides, how can I go all hater on such a happy little plant?

Neglect would be the next obvious thing, or probably the first one for gardeners. Yes, there’s mulch, but it hasn’t prevented grass-like weeds from encroaching, and no one has taken time to deadhead. It has a few splotchy leaves–disease? pests? has anyone even wondered?–and clearly has not been trimmed or shaped in any fashion.

This is 99% due to my lack of skills in or proclivity for gardening in any form. My husband has some skills–he managed to keep us in tomatoes for a couple of summers–but gardening is vanishingly low on his interest list. As in, after those two summers, it vanished completely.

Not that I can’t make a case. Everything I read about climate change says, Get native plants. Wait, I haven’t done that. The next bit is usually, let the plants have a natural cycle, which I take to mean, Leave them alone. That I can manage. Bugs and birds and butterflies forage and nest and insert larvae into fallen stems and leaf litter, and we leave them to it for the most part. This particular plant may be a little neater than some others in our yard, but I have no intention of showing you those.

I do wonder at my own lethargy sometimes. It’s not a lack of energy. I have plenty of energy to hike, and give tours of the lab, and haul marine mammals off the beach, and folk dance multiple times a week, and stand for eight hours at my job. Looking at our garden makes me guilty, but then I go read a book and forget about it.

I have ideas for the garden and I would love for them to be magically enacted. I realize that in my cohort this would actually translate into, Engage a gardening service. My climate-savvy gardener friends seem to have trouble finding anyone who knows how to garden in ways that optimize nature; they spend a lot of time supervising to catch mistakes, and explaining why they don’t want to decompact their soil, for example.

I’m definitely not qualified to direct this activity.

I do have two native plant sites bookmarked though, and after retirement, who knows? Maybe I will need more activities to fill my time. Or maybe I will meet my dream gardener and hire her/him. Or maybe I will get a pet unicorn.