Short essay "Small Lot Lament"

If the Head Gardener had handed down the tablets to the likes of me, he surely would have revised the 10th Commandment:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor thy neighbor's husband, nor thy neighbor's lot-no matter how vast and perfectly sited and excruciatingly unappreciated by its brown-thumbed owners.

When my husband and I and our two boys first moved into this suburban neighborhood four years ago, I was consumed with longing. Oh, the two-story house we had chosen was just right. And it sat kitty-corner from tennis courts and within spitting distance of the neighborhood swimming pool. Plus, smack dab across the street lay a two-acre open space, perfect for ball kicking, kite flying and all other manner of boyish pursuit.

But as you've heard, you can't have it all. Unlike many lots in our development, ours was a modest fifth of an acre-surely too tiny for the lush and varied garden of my dreams.

Often that first year, I walked the neighborhood with an ungenerous heart. My covetous eye critiqued every lot I passed. Common in my '70s neighborhood are winding concrete walks leading to concrete stoops flanked by shorn arborvitae. Foundation plantings consist of junipers or euonymous in soldierly formation and mostly, grass laid lot-line-to-lot-line like so much wall-to-wall shag. Thirty years ago, pint-sized Colorado blue spruce were planted here, there, and everywhere; today they gobble up entire front yards.

If only those large lots were mine.

I ached most for the handful of lakefront lots. With south-facing backyards, they slope gently to the tranquil neighborhood lake, which laps at their edges and glitters blue-green in the sunlight. Across the lake lies an unobstructed view of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

And what had my lakeside neighbors planted in this gardener's Valhalla? Great swaths of Kentucky bluegrass, which hogs water in our arid climate and goes brown where the sprinklers miss. A few spirea and crimson barberry dotting the grass. Gangly, limbed-up lilacs. A silly, single row of red and yellow tulips in April. Not a perennial bed in sight.

Oh, the square footage! Oh, the potential!

If this were mine, this lovely real estate, I thought, I would worship on bended knee. I would pay homage with the sweat of my brow. I would double-dig bed after bed, enrich with compost and baptize with fish emulsion. I would plant daphne and smokebush and all the Graham Thomas roses. There, under that towering cottonwood, I would naturalize thousands of daffodils. And there, on the lee side of that swell, I would tuck a cluster of baptisia, gather their pods and sprinkle the seeds surreptitiously onto that patch of bare ground next door.

But soon I was pregnant again and nauseous; my gardening dreams lay fallow while I lay on the couch. The next year it was my three little boys, not my garden, that required tending. I looked out at my own wall-to-wall Kentucky bluegrass and overgrown mugo pines and regretted my earlier bravado. I couldn't even garden my paltry fifth-acre. How did I ever think I could do better with more?

The next year I got sick. Doctors couldn't pinpoint a diagnosis, but I was in constant pain. I spent far more time in waiting rooms than in my garden. It seems life can waylay the most enthusiastic gardener and that some things are even more essential than flowers in June.

This spring I'm feeling better. I am not completely well and may never be again, but I am gardening. Last fall I prepared and planted my first perennial bed. Mine is a dry garden, chockfull of fiercely beautiful agastache and yarrow and penstemon-natives that thrive on our scant annual precipitation. It consumes just a corner of my sunny side yard. Who knew a fifth-acre could feel like more than enough.

And I am walking again, eying my neighbors' gardens every step of the way. Only now I'm thrilled to watch those gangly, limbed-up lilacs burst into bloom. The spirea are lovely, with their fountains of white, and even the giant blue spruce, tipped in springy green, make me smile. If I look carefully (and I do), I can also find rarer treasure: there, in that otherwise plain yard a redbud's lavender fireworks and there, jutting onto the sidewalk like a lady of the night, the frilly pink petticoat of a lone tree peony.

Now I understand that my little lot is but one room in the garden that is my neighborhood. And it's pretty foolish to covet what is already, in a way, mine. It's like the borrowed views that landscape designers talk about. Among gardeners and non-gardeners alike, I'm for borrowing back and forth whatever 's best among us.

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