Super awesome day at the garden

The invitation arrived in my inbox from daughter No. 2.  You know, Coco, the reluctant trendsetter and green peace advocate. It was Volunteer Day, more suitably named “get your mom to do slave labor for free,” at the Santa Ana Botanical Garden. I was tempted to ignore the invite. But yesterday morning had been a beautiful spring day. What better way to spend it than amongst the blooming flowers and colorful creatures?

I arrived, a little ill-prepared. It was downright hot. Coco handed me sunblock. I swabbed it on my face and arms. I looked like my two nieces after they’d opened the tube of diaper rash ointment and smeared it on their bodies.

“Look at that gorgeous purple aconitum,” Coco said. I got the purple part. The rest went right over my head. Everyone around me spoke plant. The only words I understood were flower and weed. My daughter instructed me to place the penstemons next to the artemisias. Soon the pattern in my assigned area looked like it had been planted in time to the William Tell overture —  seedling, shrub, seedling, shrub, seedling, shrub, shrub, shrub.

I heard her make a comment under her breath about the lame volunteers. The hair the back of my neck stood up. “Not you,” she smiled. “That’s what we call the spouts that spring up on their own.” Good thing. I was ready to make like a tree and leave.

A brown squirrel approached one of the big orange blooms. He sat erect on his haunches less than three feet from Coco. He looked her square in the eyes and chomped a big bite out of the bud. Last week, his gray cousin Fred, our brazen neighborhood rodent about the size of a housecat, sized up the fruit trees in our yard. My husband said the day before he’d come in the house to find him sitting on the couch, reading the Farmer’s Almanac about the gestation period of nectarines. He claimed he smelled a whiff of cigar smoke.

At the garden, I watched the joy on the face of my daughter, the same delight I’d seen when as a little girl in her frilly Sunday dress, she sat on a pile of dirt, digging. She pulled a crumbled list and plot plan from her pocket. It was so good to see one of my adult children take after me — anal.

I did walk out of the garden a little more versed in plant language — a weed is anything growing where you don’t want it to be.