Garden Fever and Catalogs

I think I have it. Garden Fever. Gasp of dread. The weather has been cold all weekend and today we had rain. Bummer. I couldn't find Garden Fever or an antidote for it in the medical dictionary or thesaurus. But I did find Cabin Fever: anxiety caused by living indoors for a long period of time; claustrophobia; winter blues and seasonal affective disorder. Oh, and the last definition was temporary insanity. I think the definition of Garden Fever must be: Temporary insanity caused by anxiety over long periods of winter, juxtaposed with the desire for the seasonal affects of living outdoors under sky blues while working in an orderly garden.

Because of the weather, I couldn't plant the last Fair Bianca on the deck today along with the last Sceptre'd Isle and Pat Austin. Nor could I plant the nine new Miniature Roses: Toy Clown, Earthquake, Lavender Lace, Orange Honey, Sugar Plum, Green Ice, Sheri Ann, Rise 'n' shine and Stars 'n' Stripes.

So late this afternoon, as an antidote to my Garden Fever, I tried to find more info on my roses. I found two really great web sites. The first is HelpMeFind.com , "A site devoted to roses and all that is rose related, including selecting, buying, breeding, caring for and exhibiting. We have cataloged over 26,000 roses and have more than 29,000 photos along with thousands of rose nurseries, public and private gardens, rose societies, authors, breeders, hybridizers and publications from all over the world." I could spend hours wandering around this site.

Check out the funky feature on that site where you search for a rose that "sounds like ____". I did words like "teapot" and "glue" but the results didn't actually rhyme. So I cheated a bit and typed in "Zeppelin Druid" but I didn't get Zepherine Drouhin as I hoped. Still, it's a fun feature to play with.

The other web site is Dave's Garden. Really nifty site. Especially the feature where members of the community can upload photos of plants. I got to see 10 photos of Pat Austins. Awesome.

All that reading made me so excited. I decided to turn my Garden Fever into a full-blown case of Gardening Belief. Garden Fever makes you long for what you don't have and you get real grumpy. I was SO grumpy today. Gardening Belief gives you hope that what you don't have might turn into something eventually. Which is why I'm considering another order from Spring Hill Nursery.

Spring Hill has this nifty feature that lets you search for plants by type, amount of sun exposure, zone, color, and, most important, usage. Usage options include DEER RESISTANT. Forget color, cut flower and rock garden categories; I go straight to what really counts - the Deer Resistant category. As a bonus, if you purchase a deer-resistant plant, you just bought yourself a long-lasting category plant. No deer, no death-by-consumption; a real Two-fer-One deal!

Running full steam with Gardening Belief, I called my mom and told her about the stack of gardening catalogs in today's mail. I asked my mom which companies were good. "Oh, that one always goes straight into the garbage," she said about the first. "Nothing I've ever bought from them grows."

It never occurred to me that plants you buy from the catalogs might not make it. I know there's a certain percentage of Fail Factor for cheapy plants purchased from a flea market. But catalogs have a reputation, right?

My mom had never heard of two of the catalogs I received. I told her all about the gorgeous photos. "You know they paint the plants, don't you?" she asked me. I pondered this while she added "Check out the blue flowers. No blue flower was ever as bright as they show in catalogs. Plus, the leaves behind the flowers are all washed out because they don't paint the leaves."

whew. I sure do have a lot to learn. In addition to a garden-vision factor and garden-numbers factor, I now have to add a vendor-trust factor. We're not talking elementary math any more. No, no. We're getting into advanced physics. We're getting into something like, um, maybe Bio-agricultural Engineering Statistics of Modern Grafted Plant Species Physics.

I totally made that up. But it's enough to cause some kind of fever.