I am also virtually under house arrest. If we do go out, it seems to invariably be to S’s pediatrician. The trips also involve lugging a huge diaper bag which seems somewhat excessive, but somehow,  within the space of an hour we seem to end up using every single item in the bag.

S and I are now at different stages of life. She is at the stage where she wants to look at people and coo at them.  I am at the stage where I want to ignore her and go to sleep.  It does not help that she likes to coo at 3 am.  It looks like along with her Indian genes, she has also inherited a body clock tuned to IST 

My parents are over here to help, and I cannot imagine how I would manage without them.  I wonder how women in the US manage these initial weeks without familial help, it must be overwhelming.

It is also amazing how much stuff a tiny baby needs.  Nearly every room in the house has at least one item of S.  We opted not to put her crib in a separate nursery, so her crib, and a rocker-recliner are in our bedroom, along with diapers, wipe warmers, bottle warmers and so on.  My dresser has been mostly taken over by her. Downstairs in the family room, there is a Play Yard with a bassinet that serves as her crib during the day.  The family room is also littered with a swing, a gym/ play mat, changing pad, various boxes with her diapers, dresses and every imaginable kind of baby product.  Her car seat and strollers are in another room.  One kitchen countertop has been taken over by bottle drying racks and sterilization equipment.  Hand sanitizers are now to be found in every room.  If this is bad enough, I know it is only going to get worse from here – at least the floor is not littered with her toys – yet.

The list of things a baby in the US finds a necessity seems to be rather a long one. I got a lot of help from  Patrix and Ash in navigating the maze of stuff  I needed to buy – Ash sent me a spreadsheet she had which listed the essentials and the desirables, along with suggestions on brand, price etc. which was very useful. R spent a lot of time researching every thing from car seats and strollers to different types of cloth diapers (and that’s a subject for a whole new  post).

I don’t have time for any such research now.  It is not the recovery from the C-section that has been hard, it is the lack of sleep that has made these last few weeks tough to bear.  I sleep in intervals of one and two hours, and for someone who has never missed her eight hours of sleep, whatever the occasion, this is a little tough.  But it is getting better – not because she is sleeping longer, but I am learning to manage with less sleep

So there it is, folks, and now I think I am going to take a nap.

Unfortunately, nothing much has happened in the twenty five years since then.  Warren Anderson, then chairman on Union Carbide, has still not been extradited due to “US business interests”, compensation to the affected has been meagre (Rs, 25,000? really?) and thousands more were kept out of the settlement.

And now, with all these issues,  the State government wants to spend Rs 116 crores on a memorial.

Mr. Gaur, a former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, said the State government has sought Rs. 116 crore from the Centre to build a memorial for the victims in the factory premises spread over an area of 67 acres. However, he said that people would not be allowed to enter the Factory unit which once manufactured pesticides, adding the visitors can see it from a distance.

I can see exactly whom this memorial would benefit.

Two years ago,  I had blogged about my own memories of the Bhopal gas tragedy.  I have nothing more to add, really.   I am, of course, one of the lucky ones – having lived through Bhopal to blog about it.

I re-read “A Suitable Boy” after many years. Okay, “re-read” is not exactly how you would describe it; I selectively read parts and flipped through others.

I can understand that when we go back to the same book after many years, we may see it differently. There may be meanings we hadn’t understood earlier, or maybe an entirely new sub-text. But can the characters of the story change drastically?

I read the book the first time around many years ago, and I don’t remember what I thought of each character. But I do remember thinking that Kabir was the hero. I can now see why I thought that. Vikram Seth makes sure you think this – he takes pains to tell you that Kabir is tall, dark and handsome. Just in case you don’t make the connection from such descriptions as “6 feet tall” and “aquiline features”, he makes sure to have at least one character tell you that he is, in fact, “tall, dark and handsome”. Oh, and he even has wavy hair. Seth doesn’t actually have some character tell you “this is the hero”, but that must surely be an oversight. Lata, the heroine, agonizes that she cannot marry him. He is unsuitable to her family, but not to her.

Now I read the book again many years later and what do I think? Kabir comes across as a somewhat self- centered and insensitive guy. He is controlling and possessive, and a little thoughtless. I am not very sure I like him, despite the aquiline features and did I mention, wavy hair ? I wonder what Lata sees in him. (Although, I must add that I love the way Seth has sketched his character).

Surely I couldn’t have liked this Kabir all those years ago. Now, I am sure my views have not changed, so I have come to the conclusion that Kabir has changed. How can this be? Maybe there are multiple copies of Vikram Seth novels, with different characters and possibly even different endings. Or maybe the solution involves multiple universes. Nah, I’ll stick to the multiple copies. I am sure there is no better explanation.

Has this happened to any of you? Have you found a book or a character to change so dramatically?

Instead, I was mystified to find that I didn’t understand large swathes of the movie. The story seemed to start somewhere in the middle, and new characters popped up all over the place with no explanation. While I had no idea how these people were and how they were all related, everyone else in the movie seemed to welcome them like long-lost friends.

The only other time this sort of thing happens is if the movie is an adaptation of a book. Usually, in such cases, I would have read the book, and would be loudly protesting that key scenes have been removed. The LOTR DVD set has been lying around for years now, and the only time I watched Part 1, I was indignant at all the scenes that were never shot.

But back to Pirates. The story seemed to move ahead in Brownian motion, and soon we found ourselves combating randomness with randomness. We started watching it in fast forward-pause-watch-fast forward mode. This seemed to work very well.

Until they introduced a guy with kohl rimmed eyes and dreadlocks who seemed to be talking to twenty versions of himself.

“This is Capt. Jack Sparrow”, I said confidently, with the air of an expert. I had, you see, read the back of the DVD cover.

Capt. Jack Sparrow is a fascinating character, as you’ll agree (since I’m sure you’ve all watched Pirates long ago). I could see that he had a lot of time at sea to do his eye make-up. He also had a lot of time to launder his shirts, which is how his shirts were such a pristine white. Unfortunately, his razors, if he owned any, must have all rusted at sea, which is why he had that unkempt goatee.

The movie did have a very nice ending which would have made any Bollywood movie proud. Sunsets were involved, and so were reunions with family, there were magical special effects and even sepia tones. The kind of perfect ending that would be a sequel writer’s nightmare.

But the rest of the movie seemed like a whodunit where you try to figure out where the story is buried.

I was very puzzled that this movie became such a hit. Why did it run for so long? What was I missing?

So I went off to read the New York Times review of the movie, and the reader reviews.

It was then that I had the Big Revelation. I realized that there was more than one “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. There had, in fact, been three of them. Two had released in consecutive years.

Okay, you can all stop laughing now. How was I to know?

So I went back to take a really close look at the DVD cover. Sure enough, there it was, again in very small letters. “At World’s End”.

I hadn’t seen those letters before, a fact that will not surprise you anymore. But even if I had, I doubt it would have meant anything to me at that time.

But now I knew. Not only were there three Pirates movies, but I had somehow managed to borrow the last one. Not only was this the last, but according to reviews, easily the worst.

Anyway, now I know the story ends. Sometime in the future, when I go to the library, I hope to find out how it all began.

But from now onwards, I know that a library card alone is not enough to borrow DVDs. I need to arm myself with a magnifying lens.

If you are thinking that lightning struck, or the DVD player crashed and burned, or that it simply failed to work – having atrophied from disuse,  well, all these look likely scenarios, and could have happened to anyone.  Nothing of that sort happened though, but they could well have, in an alternate universe, or even if I was having a bad day.

But the DVD player worked smoothly, as if it had been doing this sort of thing every day.  And yet I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong.

I knew that Robin Hood was an old movie, dating back to sometime in the early nineties. Two decades old, and probably some of the readers of this blog had not even started school back then.   But surely, even back in those old days, movies were made in color?   Why did this look like a remastered B&W movie?  And wasn’t Kevin Costner supposed to be Robin Hood?  Who was this guy with the curly, blond hair and bright green frock-coats?  Someone in the remastering section obviously liked color. Not content with bright green frock-coats, he had settled on an even brighter red cloak.   With that color combination, and given that he seemed to be forever perched on a tree in the Sherwood Forest, he looked like a very handsome parrot, although I prefer my parrots to be smaller sized.

Gradwolf and Kalafudra came close, though even they were decades away.  I was not watching “Robin Hood: Men in Tights“, circa 1993.  But they were right, I was certainly not watching the DVD of  Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (circa 1991) that I had thought I had borrowed.

I  was actually watching “The Adventures of Robin Hood” circa 1938, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de  Havilland.   (The same one that Shambu remembers).  These, apparently are not even the only Robin Hood movies produced, as IMDB will tell you. Obviously, they have been producing one Robin Hood movie a day with the express purpose of confusing me.

I took a closer look at the DVD cover and realized that it did say “The Adventures of”  but in font size 3.  Still, you’d say, how could you not see that guy on the cover did not look anything like Kevin Costner?   That’s true, I realize now, he doesn’t, but you tend not to be particular about how Kevin Costner looks like when you are juggling an armful of books.  If he wanted to wear bright green caps with feathers that looked like cat’s tails and dye his hair in two colors, who was I to object?

The movie, at any rate, was hilarious.  Of course, the green frock-coat (or frock? or skirt?) would have been quite adequate to provide the hilarity, but as it turns out, there was much more.  I ended up congratulating myself on a good find.  Sadly, this might mean that no lessons on reading small fonts have been learnt.

Then, a few weeks later, after multiple online renewals, I finally got around to watching the other DVD I had borrowed – the “Pirates of the Caribbean” one.  I was pretty sure I was going to love this one..

But did I?  What do you think happened this time?

(To be continued)

Rest assured, I am not going to start writing movie reviews.  But I will now proceed to tell you why. When you know the answer, you’ll realize what a narrow escape you’ve had.

The thing is, I seem to watch movies much more infrequently than most people I know.  Usually, by the time I get around to watching a movie, they have been elevated to Ancient Classics.  Which of course means that all the reviews have been written long ago and no one is interested in them anymore.

Or if I do watch a movie on the day it’s released, the whole experience is such a novelty to me that I end up actually liking the movie.  This happened with Saawariya, and I still like the Broadway-show like sets and the music. Though, of course, if I’d written a review exhorting people to go watch Saawariya, I’d have been lynched by now.

Watching desi movies in theaters comes with its own kind of issues, which I’ve blogged about before. But even in the movies that are widely shown, I dawdle to the theater after weeks.

You’d think I would at least watch movies at home, but I haven’t got around to doing that either.  Netflix regularly sends me postcards promising free trial subscriptions, and I keep telling myself it sounds like a great idea.  But eventually, the postcards go into the recycle bin.  By some mysterious and unexplained law of nature, I will always take a look at the card the day after the offer expires, and this has no relation to how long the card has been sitting around.

The other day I was in the library and actually strayed into the DVD section.  My usual mode in the library these days is (i) Go to Random shelf   (say Fiction G-K), (ii) Grab Books till you cannot carry any more (iii)  Checkout (iv) Run.  So I applied the same technique to the DVDs.

I saw “Robin Hood” in large letters and thought to myself, wasn’t this nominated for Oscars and Grammies and so on?  Of course, it’s somewhat old, I told myself,  but I don’t remember watching it anyway, so let me grab it.  Then I saw “Pirates of the Caribbean” and grabbed that too.  I would have grabbed some more, but my books were already reaching up to my shoulders and I could have won myself an Intermediate Juggling certificate right then.

I came home very satisfied with myself and popped “Robin Hood” in the DVD player.  I then sat down to watch.

What do you think happened?

(To be continued)

Oh, all right, the lawn has finally been cut and black dirt has been filled in to raise the bed. Well, most of the black dirt. In the calm early morning light of Sunday, they could see that a few more wheel barrow loads were needed.

So they hobbled back and forth and filled the beds with more dirt, and now they could start the planting.

But first, they had to decide how the plants would go into the bed. They whipped out the printout of their spreadsheet and looked at the heights and widths of the plants. Since they were starting from the back of the bed, the bigger plants would go in first, they decided. They started organizing the pots, and argued a little over the layout. Soon, they had picked out all the plants that were going to be planted.

But what about the 64 plants that had been bought in the Farmer’s Market? A lot of these would not be planted immediately. But they had grown much bigger in the last few weeks, curling their roots around every inch of the tiny pots they came in. Outgrowing their pots meant they were now perennially thirsty and seemed parched despite the regular watering.

These plants had started to droop and adopt the pose of Rodin’s “Thinking Plant”. They were clearly thinking profound, philosophical thoughts. “Is life worth living?”, they were asking themselves. “If I am anyway going to be reborn, should I get a headstart on that right away?” and the more important philosophical question “Why does the lawn get so much water and I get so little?”

The climbers among the plants had put out long tendrils, searching for a foothold in the ground. Perhaps they were trying to latch onto the ground and swing, Spiderman-like, out from their tiny pots.

Twisted Ankle and Busted Back spent a few hours moving the plants into bigger pots. Within an hour, as their roots explored their bigger homes, the plants forgot all their philosophy and sat up, looking very pleased with themselves. Within a day, they had started to wonder whether they would get an even bigger pot if they grew fast enough.

What does it all tell you? That this tendency to land grab is not unique to humans.

After repotting these plants, Twisted Ankle and Busted Back carried on planting in the perennial bed. A few hours later, the perennial bed was complete.

Twisted Ankle and Busted Back surveyed the flower bed they had just finished planting. Then they counted the plants. Thirty eight plants had been planted since morning. A lot of them were in bloom, and the flower bed was looking very attractive with pink and purple blossoms.

Then they turned around and their eyes widened as the full horror of their situation struck them in the face.

They had barely dug up about a third, or maybe a quarter of the first phase of the bed. If you consider their complete design, they had finished just 10%. The rest of it was still lawn that neeeded to be cut up and filled. There were still a hundred plants to be planted.

There was a little hill of black dirt, 3 feet tall by 8 feet wide, sitting on the driveway, and so far, their shovels had only created a dent on one side that looked like a mini landslide. They had to move the entire hill if they were to open the third garage stall at all. That was going to take weeks, if not months.

But there was more. It was already August, and next month, they would have to start planting the fall bulbs. There were about five hundred bulbs in the garage.

Is that so surprising? It shouldn’t be. Last year, Twisted Ankle and Busted Back had succumbed to bulb-buying frenzy, buying fall bulbs in much the same way they bought plants this year. Hundreds of bulbs had been bought in a burst of misguided enthusiasm, and only about a hundred or so of them had been planted. Of those, the tulips had bloomed beautifully in the spring, while not a single one of the crocuses had bloomed. Was it the voles? Who knows? But there were still tulips, daffodils, allium, muscari, bearded irises and some other bulbs in the garage that had to be planted this year.

Then, in spring, the canna and peony that were also hiding in the garage needed to be planted.

Oh, and then there were the seedlings.

Some months back, Twisted Ankle had bought 3 packets of seeds of lavender and delphiniums. Three tiny packets. The packets contained a 100 seeds each, and she was hoping that atleast ten of them would germinate. She had even less hope about the delphiniums, since these are notoriously hard to grow.

The lavender had other ideas, all 200 of them seem to have germinated and grown into seedlings.? Even the picky delphiniums had germinated in the tens. At the rate at which they were growing, they would need to be transplanted soon into tiny pots. And next spring, they would all have to be planted too..

Twisted Ankle and Busted Back suddenly realized that the perennial bed had booked all their summer AND fall AND spring weekends. They could see themselves spending every weekend toiling in the garden, until the first snow fell and wiped the landscape into a blur of white. And then coming back into the garden again as soon as the last traces of snow had melted in spring.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Busted Back had developed a serious case of PlantBuyingophilia. Now he could not go to any big box store or the Farmers Market without heading first for the plants. He saw plants everywhere. He wanted to buy all the plants he saw, and I mean all, every one of them. The plants have bewitched Busted Back, and there is no known wizard in the world who can break the spell. Twisted Ankle would protest, but only until she came face to face with the plants. Then, she too, would find herself falling under the spell of the plants.

If you notice a couple in your local nursery or garden center buying plants in the dozens, observe them carefully. Does one of them clutch his back every now and then? Does the other walk with a barely noticeable limp, and grab every perennial plant she sees on the shelf? Do they both walk out, pushing carts loaded with perennials and a glazed, distant look in their eyes?

If you see these things, you are looking at Twisted Ankle and Busted Back going on yet another buying spree to fill their perennial bed.

If you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of this story, you would know that Twisted Ankle and Busted Back have set out to create a perennial bed in their backyard. They have had a few nasty surprises so far, and they think they have seen it all. Little do they know.

Armed with their design sketch for the perennial bed, TA and BB used a hose pipe to draw out an outline of the bed on the lawn. They spent the usual ten minutes arguing about the convexity of the curve and the length of the arc and the area of the segment. After everything was agreed to mutual satisfaction, TA and BB started cutting out a portion of the lawn.

In their minds, this was supposed to be the easiest part. In all the instructions and accounts you find on the Internet, this sounds incredibly easy. Just cut out around the outline, they say, and dig your shovel in, and the grass will automatically roll itself into neat bundles that look like large green swiss rolls.

But TA and BB were of the cautious type. So they budgeted a few hours to cut the lawn. It will be easy, they thought, but it might take some time. So they thought they would spend half of Saturday cutting the lawn, and then they would shovel powdered black dirt (a.k.a mud) to raise the height of the flower bed and plant flowers. Surely, cutting the lawn should only take a little more time than planting the perennials.

They were eagerly awaiting the weekend, when they could start planting. When TA and BB surveyed the garden one weekday evening and watering all the new plants, they looked at each other and said “Why wait until the weekend? Why not cut the lawn today?”

After all, cutting the lawn was only going to take half an hour.

So they started cutting. BB used a crowbar to dig out the outline of the bed. Then he dug under the lawn with a shovel. TA started to roll up the lawn.

They worked for an hour. They completed all of 3 feet.

At this point, TA realized that rolling up lawns was not a skill set she could list on her resume. So she regretfully gave up the attempt and started tearing out little patches of lawn. “Little” is a relative term, for these patches were one to two feet across, and seemed to weigh a few pounds each.

But progress was slow. TA and BB could see their weekday evenings getting booked with “cutting the lawn” listed prominently on their Outlook calendars.

After three days of work, they had managed to cut a somewhat rectangular patch that was 15 feet by 10 feet. Not even a third of their original grand design.

“We need a sod cutter”, BB said, trying to stay upright without clutching his back. “We should rent one from Big Box store.”

Unfortunately, the sod cutter also came with other requirements – a pickup truck to transport it, and two burly men to lift it into a truck. Neither of which were available.

So they decided to cut out the lawn in instalments. They decided to finish planting in the area that they had cut out.

When they had finished cutting out the lawn, they realized that there was a small hole in the middle of the cleared area.

“This must be a mole hill”, BB said. “Looks like we have moles too.”

“It doesn’t have any mud around it. More like a mole hole”, TA said as she too, shuddered at the prospect of sharing their garden with moles.

They doused the hole with water, but it seemed a shallow hole and no denizens came out. So they covered up the hole. Then TA and BB started raising the level of the entire bed by adding black dirt and compost. The black dirt supplier had thoughtfully delivered the entire truckload of mud on the front driveway, instead of the backyard as requested. He was very thoughtful; but he was thinking about his truck, and whether it would climb back up the steep slope to the backyard. So this dirt had to be ferried in a wheelbarrow, down the steep slope to the backyard.

TA and BB decided they might need 6 or 7 wheelbarrow loads of dirt. They started shoveling dirt into the wheelbarrow.

If you hear TA’s narrative, you would think she did most of the shoveling. She had developed a nice, clean and efficient technique for shoveling dirt into the wheelbarrow. BB, on the other hand, may insist that he did more shoveling because he used a much larger snow shovel. TA may counter that she shoveled in at least two shovel-loads of dirt for every shovel-load of BB.

The argument may never be satisfactorily resolved. But BB does not have a blog, so it’s TA’s views which we would hear

They made eight or nine trips with the heavy wheelbarrow down the steep slope, BB carrying the wheelbarrow down. Somewhere between the shoveling and the even more difficult trips with the heavy wheelbarrow, BB officially became “Busted Back”, a title he maintains to this day. TA’s back held up gamely despite all the shoveling, but finally, while following Busted Back down the slope, she placed her foot in an uneven portion of the lawn and twisted her ankle.

“I think I stepped on another mole hole!”, Twisted Ankle said as she clutched her foot in pain.

“Well, at least it wasn’t a worm hole”, Busted Back said as he clutched his back. “Otherwise, where would you be? Ha ha”.

Twisted Ankle was not amused. She was hopping mad. Well, she was hopping, at any rate.

“Let’s stop here today”, she said, and Busted Back was only too happy to agree.

As the shadows deepened across the lawn, Twisted Ankle and Busted Back walked back, dragging their long shovels like weary batsmen at the end of a successful day at Lords.

(To be continued. The story concludes in the next part.)

Reading about the perennial buying spree, you’d think TA and BB were impulsive plant buyers who had no idea what they were getting into. This was certainly true in the beginning.But there’s nothing like a 25 mile drive from Boondocksville with a carload to plants to make you feel the need for a Plan.

So TA and BB spent weeks designing the perennial bed they were going to create. Seventeen books were borrowed from the library on perennial garden designs, easy to grow plants, native plants, deer-resistant plants, hardy plants, flowering perennials, shade loving perennials and perennials for cold climates. Soon, one could not pick up a cushion on the couch or move a paper on the table without uncovering a book on perennial gardening.

All these books were pored over and copious notes were taken. If any university had offered a course on perennial gardening, TA and BB would have graduated with flying colors.

Artworks were created on pen-and-paper. These were detailed designs for the perennial bed, which had plans for how the bed would look like and where each plant would go. Surprisingly, TA and BB did not use computer aided design, or advanced graphics to simulate how their plant bed would look like. Even more surprisingly, they did not even draw a scaled down version of their perennial bed. The horror!

But nonetheless, they did have a detailed drawing of how their perennial bed would look like.

But they didn’t stop here. “Spreadsheets”, their minds shouted. “Where are the spreadsheets?” Obviously, drawings were all very well, but the geek in them knew that no information is complete unless it is neatly laid out in a spreadsheet.

So spreadsheets were duly created on perennials, listing out their common names and botanical names, the height and width they grow to, sun/ shade requirements, bloom period, color of flowers, pH levels of soil required, watering requirements, propagation (by seed, cuttings or dividing bulbs or rhizomes) and other remarks like what plant it looks best when planted beside.

The idea was to create a perennial bed with plants layered by height, with different plants blooming at different periods of the year, in varying color combinations.

Armed with this knowledge, TA and BB decided they actually knew a lot about perennials now. TA always carried a printout of the spreadsheet in her handbag. While buying plants, she would peek into it at key moments to appear knowledgeable. “Oh, this is a Coreopsis “Moonbeam”, isn’t it?” she’d say very knowledgeably to the seller. Or “I want a Dicentra and a Ligularia for the shaded front bed”.

Not that either TA or BB needed much help to appear knowledgeable. By now, they were talking in Latin with each other. Their sentences were filled with words like Aquilegia, Achillea, Agastache and Astilbe and worse, they knew exactly which plant they were talking about in each instance.

Sometimes, even the gardeners/plant sellers would be confused. “Achillea?” they’d ask in confusion. “Oh, I meant Yarrow”, TA would say graciously, for she knew the common name of these plants as well (as well as the different common varieties and bloom colors).

But too much knowledge can be confusing.

“No, no, Pulmonaria is Lungwort” TA would tell BB. “Is that what we wanted?”

“No, I think it was Tradescantia, Spiderwort”, BB would say. “It blooms in summer. Lungwort blooms in Spring.”

“Or did we choose Astrantia or Masterwort? That also blooms in Summer?”

Obviously it is one of these worts, but which one?

They asked Google. Google neatly evaded the question and added to the confusion by introducing them to even more kinds of worts, including Swallow-worts, Honeyworts, Moneyworts, Leadworts, Ragworts and Soapworts, Bruiseworts, Bellworts and even a St. John’s wort. There were Butterworts and Bladderworts that were insectivorus plants, and there was a Liverwort which was some kind of moss.

TA and BB had stumbled upon the universal naming technique for plants – think of any word in the dictionary, add the suffix “wort” and voila, you have a plant name! Now, to discover the elusive and rare species that will be named Lekhniwort.

All this newfound knowledge made TA and BB appear as expert gardeners. They could maintain this appearance for about 30 seconds. After that, invariably, they would have to talk about the plant they were looking at.

You cannot say “I love this plant with the funny green leaves and yellow flowers! Is this an Achillea “Moonshine” that grows 1 to 3 feet tall, blooms in summer, prefers full sun and mildly acidic soil?”

No, you have to be able to identify an Achillea when you see one. At least, you have to if you are posing as an expert.

But this is exactly where the spreadsheet was of absolutely no help. So while they had a vague idea of how the leaves of a geranium and a purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) look, they had no idea about most other plants.

They could get away with this with the plants bought at the garden centers. Those pots all came with large name tags that identified each plant and had details about height and width and so on. But those 64 plants they bought in the Farmer’s Market? None of those had no name tags! TA and BB knew what they bought, but they did not know which of the plants was the Baby’s Breath and which was the Bachelor’s Button. Or which was a Goat’sbeard. They all looked like, well, plants.

So now TA and BB were left with a detailed spread sheet that told them all about every perennial plant they could think of. They had an even more detailed plant design drawing that showed exactly where to plant which plant.

But they had no idea what exactly most of the plants they had bought were. If they did not know what they had, how would they know where to plant it?

There was, of course, worse to come.

(To be continued…)