too much typing—since 2003

1.29.2004

Press Those Trousers!

We're planning on getting rid of all the annoying grass in our postage-stamp backyard (what's left after we'd built the brick patio, that is), and so Rose (whose undergrad degree is in landscape architecture) has been getting all these catalogs in the mail from vendors of various seeds, plantings, and other horticultural paraphernalia. Anyway, one arrived the other day bearing the slogan "Plantsmen since 1950." "Plantsmen"? (Wasn't that the band Robert Plant led in 1965 or so?) Now, it's a cliche that flowers and such are not the sorts of pursuits that impress the guys down at the construction site (unless a backhoe is involved), but that word sounds positively macho, doesn't it? "The doughty plantsman wrestles with the dreaded Heracleum mantegazziani!" No quiche for these shear-wielding bruisers! Of course, gardening already shares the term "ground cover" with an extremely macho discipline: warfare. So I suppose butching up gardening is a perfectly supportable endeavor.

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