This Halloween, I decided to go the extra mile for the neighborhood kids and buy only old-time candies. The way I see it, when Trick or Treating is over and you dump the contents of your pillow case onto the bed, you really don't want to see 50 mini Snickers bars. You want variety. So this year, I picked up a stash of retro candy at the State Farmers Market. I got some of my childhood favorites - Banana Splits, Mary Janes, Bit 0 Honeys, Jawbreakers - along with some others that I don't remember but that Ron swears by. The leftovers should be fun.

First up, Chocolate Cosmos. What a disappointment. I tried it a few years ago and, while the plant was pretty enough, all in all it was nothing to write home about. I probably should have used it in a container, but instead I plopped it into the ground, where it looked a little scraggly. Worst of all, you had to squat down, get face to face with the flower, and inhale to get the aroma. It wasn't worth it. Unwrapping a Hershey bar was easier.

But the main appeal of banana shrub is its aroma. To me, the scent is distinctly not banana; rather, it is unmistakably the smell of Banana Splits. In the warm months, when the plant is covered with flowers, the yard is filled with the gentle fragrance of cheap banana candy. It's delightful.

For those of you too young to remember, Banana Splits are little squares of extremely artificial-tasting banana taffy. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I adored them. We ("we" being my sisters, brothers, and pretty much everyone attending Post Road elementary school) used to buy them at Collins' for a nickel a piece. Located just a few blocks from school, Collins' was a combination candy-newspaper-tobacco store and one of the bedrock institutions of my childhood. My weekly allowance was hardly princely, even by 1960s standards; my father started us at 5 cents, then raised us to 10 cents at some point, now forgotten. Collins' was where I spent what little I had -- which, come to think of it, is probably why we got only 5 or 10 cents. A father's wisdom reveals itself in time. 

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It's why, when I sneaked a Banana Split from the Halloween stash, it tasted good to me, although it's basically artificially flavored sweet rubber. It's why Ron prefers an Entenmann's chocolate cake to almost anything I can bake from scratch (and I'm a pretty good baker). And it's one of the reasons I am so devoted to my banana shrub. Until they make a plant that smells like Sour Grape gum, which I vastly prefer to Banana Splits, Magnolia figo will always have a place in my heart. 

My garden is calling. My chronically under-performing acanthus is overdue for a move. The Louisiana irises need to be divided (again). There are beds to mulch, weeds to pull, and falling leaves to shred. 

Am I doing any of these things? No. I am inside, at my computer, writing this post.  

But enough about them; let's talk about me. It is astonishing how long it takes to compose one measly post. You would think I was writing the Great American Novel and not 500 words of fluff, the way I agonize. I spend days playing with word choice and sentence structure. Meanwhile, the weeds have taken over.

It's not just the writing, though. Blogging's technical challenges have swallowed entire weekends whole. Maybe that's because, from a technology standpoint, I am approximately 10 years behind. Of course I need to stay at least minimally plugged in if I expect to function in society, but I refuse to mechanize my entire life. I can turn on the lights myself, thank you very much. My cell phone is a pay-as-you-go job used strictly for travel; if you want to reach me, call my home phone. I don't text, I don't do Facebook, and I don't even like to use the word "tweet." 

And yet I have a blog. No wonder, then, that countless afternoons have been wasted focusing not on my soil's pH but on blog's xml, html, and SEO. That ideal gardening days have been spent indoors peering at unintelligible software code. That after a year of obsessing about web stats, I still have no clue how many readers I have. 

So where does this leave me? Gardening is easier than writing. Gardening is better exercise than writing. And when I spend an entire day in the garden, usually I have something to show for it. Then why write at all? I suppose it's because, as Dorothy Parker famously said, "I hate writing, but I love having written." 

Of course, Dorothy Parker actually got published - and not by clicking a mouse, either.

See you next time.

Things are looking pretty good these days in my soggy backyard garden. All I can say is, it's about time.  I've been at this long enough.

I know, I know: life's a journey, it's-not-the-destination-it's-the-ride, blah blah blah. Me? I'm an "Are we there yet?" kind of person. I like results.  

But let's pretend I'm a different kind of person - the kind who gushes, without a hint of irony, "This has been the most incredible journey." So come along with me, if you will, on my incredible soggy garden journey.

2007: the journey begins. We decided to install pavers in the driveway and extend them to a pathway around the house. A crew came in, excavated the dirt, then dumped it in the back of the yard. My pathetic remnants of a lawn were now gone. And since the contractors very kindly compacted all that excavated dirt, the flooding got worse. There was only one logical thing to do: make a garden. 

My research (and my own two eyes) told me I had a fairly challenging situation on my hands. The bottom half of the yard is low lying, with two natural streams behind it. In a rainstorm, the water overflows the streams, floods the yard, and occasionally takes down a tree. Stage 1 is massive runoff; Stage 2, standing water. Even after amending the soil, I still wind up with only the underlying clay, since the topsoil and mulch invariably sail away downstream.  

If I had half an ounce of brains and unlimited funds, I would have hired a landscaper, who would have built a French drain, hauled in truckloads of topsoil and edging materials, and created raised beds that somehow managed to look neat and natural at the same time. Since I have neither, Ron and I did it ourselves, piecemeal. It was pure idiocy, I know. But I figured that no matter how it turned out, it had to look better than it did before.  

As I continue adding to the wetland garden, aesthetics by necessity take a back seat to practicality. Can I sink my shovel into the ground without hitting too many tree roots in this spot? Good, I'll put something here. This area gets only filtered sun? Bring on the Turtlehead. Then there's the inconvenient fact that "wet tolerance" is not a one-size-fits-all definition. Some wetland plants can take days of standing water, some cannot. Very few can tolerate un-amended North Carolina clay. I "design" the garden accordingly.

I also had to accept the fact that while some wetland plants are quite ornamental, many are not. But beggars can't be choosers. Juncus has its uses, as does Winterberry holly. Ron once weed-whacked my tussock sedges, thinking they were weeds. Which, in a certain way, they are. 

All things considered, though, it's not looking too bad, if I do say so myself. It may not be garden-magazine good, but it's certainly better than it was before. And of course I learned a lot along the way. 

Enough with the life lessons. Are we there yet?