You know you're a garden aficianado when ***you are as happy to see garden catalogs as holiday cards in December. ***when visiting friends, you ask to go with them to their ethnic markets and local farmers' markets in order to find new fruits and vegetables to collect seeds from. ***your kids ask Santa for seed packets for their stocking. And it's a toss up as to whether they would rather have a new toy or get to pick out a bunch of new plants at the garden center. ***the neighbors' kids pop up at the garden to see if there is anything they can plant, weed, or pick. ***you give a beautiful vase and garden catalog gift certificates to likeminded friends for wedding gifts. ***you can be seen out gardening by flashlight. ***when the neighbors' kids see you gardening by flashlight, they offer to hold the flashlight so you can garden with both hands. ***you plan your vacations to coincide with garden conferences. ***you have a hard time deciding whether to use your book store gift card for the new Harry Potter book or the new gardening book you've been wanting. ***the kids will call out the names of new plants they see while you are driving...sometimes with their latin names.
How you can spot garden aficianados at an early age ***at six months, before she can crawl, the neighbor's daughter will point to your flower beds, so that her Dad will carry her to them, and hold her over the flowers. ***at 14 months when she's wanting to learn the words for *everything* she falls in loves with the coreopsis and calls them coreops. She, however, gives the toddler-look-of-pained-dispair and walks off when she discovers that the poofy plant she likes to fluff and pet is called arborvitae. ***at 16 months she likes to be held up to the window boxes so she can point and say pah-tunnnnne-YAH and search for the praying mantises who live there among the petunias, geraniums, and the lamium. ***at 16 months she likes to smell *all* the roses in the rose bed to see how differently they all smell. Sharon [EMAIL PROTECTED]
