For a person who supposedly started this blog to write about gardening, I certainly avoid the topic shamefully. Probably because I avoid the activity equally shamefully.

About a month ago, for instance, I received a sage plant as a housewarming gift. I wrote about it here. I was going to use it as the basis for a new herb garden. One that I would not kill. I promptly stuck it in the back yard — and forgot about it. I only remembered it quite suddenly a night or two ago, as Mike and I sat talking to a friend. I think someone mentioned “sage advice.”

I leapt up with a start, smacked my forehead with my hand, and yelled “My God, I did it again!” I was sure it was dead.

Thankfully — and somewhat miraculously —  it wasn’t. True, my little sage was yellow, thinned, and wilty, but it had hung on, saved by stray drips from our neighbor’s sprinkler system. I mean, really. How pathetic can you get? My plants are surviving on the (inadvertent) irrigation of strangers. If there were such a thing as a horticultural Social Services I would be arrested by now. At the very least, I’d be banned from ever going near a nursery again. Let alone picking up a shovel. Sadly the flora of L.A. have no such protection. (There’s a cause there, for someone who’s looking for one…)

Anyway. This is why I’m planting a succulent garden. It’ll need far less tending than herbs, roses, and the like. But I fear even it may wither at my ungenerous hands. If only I could find plants that required nothing at all to survive — I might grow an exemplary patch. Since that is unlikely to occur, though, I will just have to become less “forgetful.”

Oh, did I mention the mint out front? It’s dead. All of it. They said it couldn’t be done.

They didn’t know me.