Delays to the Vision

As I mentioned earlier, I had become totally obsessed with the idea of creating an amazing container garden in my tiny patio. The only problem was that after purchasing my container plant book and many more visits to Barnes & Noble, I could only wait to get started. The City had apparently been planning to do this major work in my street, which involved digging up my patio, for the past five years. It had been delayed yet again. It also entailed many visits by the City Engineer to the site, and meeting after meeting with the HOA Board. By the time everything was squared away, we had got to the "rainy season" for San Diego, so the work had to be put on hold until it looked as though it was safe to come out again. So I read my books and made great plans, visiting The Home Depot Garden Center and looking at the various plants for sale in Vons and Ralphs, planning how they would fit into my new scheme of things. Then, almost a year later, a date was announced for the work to begin.



Great, it was all coming together at last. Actually, I’d never really done any gardening before and the houseplants I’d had, except for the type that they suggest children start with, usually shriveled up and died or got waterlogged at the last minute. I grew up in England and my parents were avid gardeners, but as a child and teenager I’d never had any interest in gardening, plus I have a phobia about most kinds of bugs, so that’s also a drawback, as the garden seems to be full of them. Anyway, this was a minor detail, I’d read the Container Plant book and was ready to go. So when the City eventually left, we had an area with nothing in it except for the bougainvillea. The large trees had had to be cut down so the whole area was blank. We’d decided to tile part of the patio, and put river rocks down where the soil had been and stand the container plants on that. Now it was time to make our first plant purchases – but where do you begin?