My So-Called Garden

This is my "garden." If you can call three concrete steps and a rectangle of dirt about 2 feet by 5 feet a garden. I love it because it gives my little gas-station adjacent apartment a false sense of permanence and seriousness. There are some herbs (rosemary, basil), and an old Kahlua bottle that I'm rather fond of because it's a little man. That orange flower is lantana, which I recently learned my uncle has a violent aversion too, after we saw some in Santa Barbara and he went off for like five minutes about how much he hates lantana. But I like it.

I got those little containers for fifty cents each at my favorite thrift store, and put some succulents in them, and I'm in love with the result. I've also got some cilantro there on the bottom right, which my boyfriend and I put in basically everything we make (I swear it tastes like pure freshness!!!!!) I found that red lantern at a garage sale for a dollar, and the cup hook that it is hanging on I actually found buried deep in the dirt when I first planted the "garden." Brush that shit off, screw it into the wood, and voila! Instant atmosphere. Below I have some some aloe, strawberries and a fuchsia in an old wheelbarrow, also a garage sale purchase.

The major problem with my garden, other than its size, is that I travel. Ah, the life of a graduate student, always jetting off to exotic locales. So a lot of what I planted last year didn't make it through the summer. But my euphorbia, a gopher proof plant with awesome structural leaves and big bushy flowers, went CRAZY being abandoned. So as soon as I got home I planted more of it. The old one is the big sage-colored bushy thing below. The new one is a darker, purple color. I put it in on the right side of the dirt bed, but my camera ran out of batteries before I could photograph it.

In my dreams I have a big garden with lots of freshly grown vegetables, some citrus trees and a chicken or two. Maybe a goat, I don't know. A girl can dream. But until then, I have my euphorbia and my lantana, and my concrete steps.