There was never much interest on my part in flowering plants. As a child I only enjoyed the perverse pleasure of popping open Chinese Lanterns and using my fingers to strip the leaves from ferns. Perhaps it was from that inauspicious beginning that I was doomed to develop a decidedly brown thumb, and that would remain very firmly the case for more than 50 years.
Fast forward to 2008 and I was older and wiser, but no closer to any kind of success with plants. I had a tiny house with a big yard in northern Illinois, but with work and my dogs, what little I did for lawn and garden were dwarfed by nature's own broad strokes. Just keeping things mowed and trimmed was more than I could handle in a weekend, so the place always looked overgrown and uninspiring. Fortunately, most of my neighbors were in the same boat.
By February I was getting ready to sell the house and move across country with my two Italian Greyhounds. My then-boyfriend-now-husband (DH) was buying a house we both loved, and I would begin a new life with him in sunny, warm Northern California. My fantasy about that area of the country was that it was always 80 degrees and forever awash with greenery of all types - nothing wouldn't grow in sunny California.
Goodbye house!
What really excited me was that DH asked me to figure out what to plant in the bare-dirt yard and garden areas behind our home. A fresh chance at gardening redemption and the opportunity to lose the curse of my brown thumb! I had no idea at the time that our house, though approximately in the northern part of California and not more than a couple of hours from S.F., was actually right at the northern tip of the San Joaquin Valley. I'm of the mind that the "Valley" part of the name is a subtle nod to "Death Valley" for how hot and dry the summers are!
