What a great thread and a great link, too!
All of us have different gardening stories, and I can add another. I grew up in Ohio, and as a girl, my mother had a fabulous iris bed that I loved. She also had lots of indoor plants that she grew at our picture window. I hated those as she never closed the drapes behind them and I felt like I lived in a fish bowl. My dad and mom had an argument over the iris bed, and he mowed it down! Now I know (thanks to NGA) that it might have come back with TLC, but Mom gave up on it. Years later, when I was in college (and Dad was dead), Mom took me to a daylily nursery. Love at first sight! She started growing those and developed a fabulous garden. But I was living in dorms and various apartments and couldn't do that. Then, after I was married and raising kids, I had a lovely home in New Mexico and started a small garden. Hubby hated that and mowed it down. End of gardening until after I was divorced. Then I bought my own house and started a lovely (if small) daylily bed, ordering plants from the Ohio nursery I had visited years before (which is now gone as far as I know). Interestingly, that garden was run by Amish folks. But as life moved on, I did, too. I started working at a school in Oklahoma, and I moved most of my daylilies to the school and gave away a few. Then I started working overseas, and of course, no garden when one is living in the middle east! Now, as a retired lady, I've bought a small home in Texas. Finally! I've started gardening again in my small yard. There's zero shade, so I'm doing daylily and iris beds. One year into this addiction, I've got about 400 cultivars to care for and am getting great and wonderful help from all of you at NGA. Like it or not, you all are my social life, and gardening keeps me busy and moving.
