Aren't hobbies supposed to be fun?

While some unenlightened souls categorize gardening as a hobby, I have to wonder about a “hobby” that mostly consists of digging holes to take out what grows freely to replace it with temperamental green divas who are willing to commit suicide by purposely drawing up their roots and folding their leaves against nourishment rather than grow where a gardener wishes them to be.


Where do gardeners get the strength--or stubbornness--to keep on fighting these battles that they can win only sporadically? Perhaps it is no different than the plight of the golfer. Putting a small white ball into a sunken cup is not “natural” either.


Like golfing--another hobby that is supposed to be fun--gardening can be an obsession, a torture, even a cause for sleepless nights and money ill spent. Because, for the hardcore fanatics, gardening is no hobby. It is a disease that offers pain, suffering, worry and agony, punctuated by occasionally glorious bursts of beauty, joy, pleasure and satisfaction.


Compliment any gardener on his or her roses or begonias and the compliment is tossed aside with observations as to weather, bugs, drought. And, as every gardener knows, “You should have seen it last week.”


The only way any plant achieves perfection is when observers are kept out. Just let me invite a friend to see anything that has fostered the deadly sin of pride in my little ol' gardening heart, and that plant will, just for the perverse fun of it, blacken and shrivel the night before the visit. At least golfing doesn't offer that kind of cruel joke (although I have been told that there are golf balls with a natural affinity for water hazards).