Garden Sunday

Clyde and I hate yard work. Even when we lived in a house with a rambling backyard garden, our major contribution to its upkeep was to hire Yard Man.

I don’t know what came over us yesterday, then — Spring Fever, maybe? — but we found ourselves in the garden center at Lowe’s, shopping for everything from calladiums (calladia?) to impatience. Back home, we invested at least two hours in the tiny garden space shoehorned into our back patio area: stringing colored lights, illuminating the Japanese lantern, arranging pots of summer greenery, and spreading marble chips to cover exposed patches of ground.

The result? Our patio now looks like an Asian-influenced garden cafe. It looks so inviting, you’d be tempted to take morning coffee there … at least until you were outside long enough for the oppressive Mississippi heat to convince you otherwise.