How does my garden grow?

Everyone admires a beautiful garden and I’m no exception, although I didn’t inherit my mother’s green thumb.  In fact, I seem to be more skilled at forgetting to water and care for the precious floras and faunas that I am at nurturing them into a healthy existence. 

An incident at my parents’ home clearly illustrates my lack of knowledge.  I commented to my sister on how pretty a yellow rose was in a floral arrangement.

“Yes,” she replied, “it would be if it wasn’t a tulip.”

Lucky for me the ability to admire doesn’t hinge on knowledge.  A pretty flower is a pretty flower and I still maintain that I love a pretty garden. 

The thought of having a lovely garden was actually the driving force behind a decision to hire a landscape company to perform a backyard make-over.  We had a lot of our own ideas and we sat down and put our thoughts on paper.  “How exciting,” we thought.

Like any project, this one was a slow evolution.  We discussed placing flower boxes here and rock walls there.  I was already planning the wonderful barbeques that we would have once our courtyard retreat was completed. 

In support of grassroots entrepreneurism, we hired a small landscaping company that I had stumbled upon a few months earlier.  So far so good, right?  Well, over the next six weeks our dreams of a glorious courtyard retreat turned into a nightmare. 

It all started well enough.  The fence was tackled first – straightened scraped and painted.  It took a little longer than expected but we were patient.  The next couple of weeks saw a corner garden and rock wall constructed.

Nice, but the rock wall wasn’t the height we had asked for.  By that time we had been waiting four weeks and my birthday barbeque that was supposed to be our first celebration in our new courtyard retreat came and went with everyone saying how nice it would be once it was finished. 

“Once it’s finished,” became the project’s theme.  Nailing down a completion date was harder than nailing Jell-O to the fence.  It was always only going to be a couple of more days. 

At that point, my spider senses were telling me we had a problem.  It was then all the questions I should have asked at the start of the project came rushing to me.  What’s the company’s track record?  We hadn’t even asked for references.  Sure, we had a quote in writing, but when I reviewed it so much was open to interpretation.

I suddenly realized that my inexperience had probably contributed to making a bad decision.  It’s confusing to deal with a project that’s new to you, which I’m sure most readers would relate to in dealing with a contractor. 

I had no idea how much a bag of “top” grade mulch should cost and I definitely had no idea how much plant material you could buy with $100 bucks.  To be truthful, by the time we were five weeks into the project the only thing I was certain of was that 18 inches isn’t two feet, the height the rock wall was supposed to be.  The rest was very cloudy and getting cloudier. 

By week six, everyone was feeling the stress.  Patio stones were laid and our troubles grew.  I watched from the sidelines, feeling more uneasy each passing day.  You know that sinking feeling that comes when you know something just isn’t going to get any better and you have to take action?  Knowing that frustration can often lead to even worse decisions, we sought some advice of someone more knowledgeable (a little late I know). 

All our concerns were confirmed, especially regarding the patio stones.  Our first course of action was to try and negotiate with the company we had hired.  We were shocked when our concerns were met with confrontational language.  After several attempts to resolve our issues we were forced to discontinue the contract and take a loss financially. 

We then licked our wounds and turned our attention to some other renovations that we had planned.  Needless to say, we hired a qualified project manager that negotiated with the contractors on our behalf and everything is going great and on schedule. 

We finally finished our courtyard retreat and now I’m content to look our window and admire the beautiful roses in our garden.  Or are they tulips?  Whatever – they really are pretty.