Landscaping

Landscaping is a term I didn’t learn until I was an adult. I don’t think it showed up in the books I read, either. My parents landscaped, all right: garden here, grass there, flowers along the north side of the house and in the flowerbed by the back door. Mulch was a novel concept; if you could buy any I didn’t know it. Compost and manure got mixed into the soil. Weeds you pulled up and laid on top of the dry dirt between the rows of tomato plants. My parents studied gardening, especially as information became more readily available; my dad pored over the Burpee seed catalog and the Reader’s Digest gardening compendium. This gardening book was a huge tome, wider than it was tall, an inch and a half thick with sturdy covers. It had a dark green background with colorful plants on the front, with that plastic sheen that meant, this book will be easy to wipe off when you get it dirty. I appreciated that plastic sheen when I got my own copy, years later.

I visited homes where the grass looked a more vivid green and the shrubs were cut into rounded shapes, but those shrubs were not edible. I knew you had to sprinkle water every few days to get that bright green. My parents watered the grass enough to keep it firmly alive, but they were not trying for awesome grass. The real advantage of sprinklers was running through them, or walking past them on the way home from school.