Garden Centres = Prostitutes

In life, there are certain circumstances that stand as a test of your relationship with your spouse. Illness. Loss of a job. A new baby. Finding out your husband frequents prostitutes. Finding out you're actually ok with that since it means you get more sleep. The list goes on and on ...

Yesterday Jamie and I discovered a new one: visiting garden centres to pick out plants for your home.

At first glance this does not appear to fall under the same category as the above circumstances. "A lovely morning at a garden centre! Being out in the fresh air, surrounded by (domesticated) nature! What more could you ask of a Sunday, really?". Well, let me tell you.

After a gorgeous late-spring drive to the garden centre just outside our city, Jamie and I arrived in fine spirits, eager to select our plants. We built our current home a few years ago and have slowly been tackling all the various additions required to not make it look like we live in a dirt pit. First it was a deck, last year saw underground sprinklers and sod, and this year -- landscaping (I know, we're livin' the dream people. Livin' the dream).

Problem #1 we discovered immediately upon arriving at the centre: Neither of us knows a thing about plants. The moment we started wandering the aisles this became rapidly apparent. Do we need full sun or partial? What hardiness should we get? How big will this grow? Do we have to do any upkeep? (this was a big one as Jamie and I are both, inherantly, lazy). This turned into back-and-forth bickering as, even though we both don't know what we're doing, we each think that each other knows less.

"Jamie, how about this one over here? It looks nice don't you think?"

"Andra, that grows to be 8 feet wide. We don't live on an acerage. I was thinking something like this instead" (gesturing towards some crap plant that he obviously doesn't know anything about because I know so much more)

"Seriously? Yellow again? Do you have some sort of yellow fetish? All the plants you like are yellow. What about this lilac bush? I've always liked lilacs"
"Andra, don't you think there's something wrong in buying a plant thats called a Korean Dwarf Bush? I mean, who comes up with these names?"

Our arguing eventually escalated to the point of angry storming-off-in-opposite-directions-to-find-a-damn-plant-that'll-fit-in-the-damn-flowerbed. While I was off on my own enjoying a break from Jamie's nattering, I realized that Every.Single.Couple. in the garden centre was also arguing, some quite loudly. It was actually incredible ... we were all having a shit time.

Jamie finally managed to track down an employee who apparently enjoys helping idiots, and Problem #1 began to slowly dissipate. Unfortunately, it was at this point that Problem #2 reared its head: Both Jamie and I, being incredibly immature, find the word "bush" funny. Which is not a good thing when you're trying to listen to an employee talk about how big a bush can get, how you have to keep the bush trimmed, and how you don't want it getting out of control.

After paying for our selection plus 12 bags of top soil, we stumbled across Problem #3: Our car sucks for transporting stuff. This led to another irritated-at-each-other argument/"discussion" while a poor teenage male loading employee tried to help out, hating his life and job. We literally used every square inch of space in the car, including all around Mason's car seat and in my lap. It was awesome.

Realizing that right about now would be a terrible time to learn that Mace has pollen allergies, home we went.

I'll post pics of the completed project pretty soon, but as it stands its actually looking semi-amazing (in my humble opinion). The fact that we live in a cul-de-sac where everyone has Martha Stewart gardening-esq skills has certainly helped in our competitive spirit, so we'll see where we end up!

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