Health & Fitness
Just in Time for Father's Day -- North Fork GUYS WHO GARDEN Week
Thoughts on why men garden and how they go about it.
Father’s Day is coming. I’ll start with a tribute to my long-suffering spouse. Though he hates flowers—ones that smell set off his allergies, big time—he has taken up gardening in part because he noticed that I can’t keep up with it alone any more. Now that’s loyalty for you! Without prompting he has made a thing of keeping the unruly shrubs, including the wisteria and forsythia, under control. A thankless job.
His one exception to the Gardening?-you’re-kidding rule, is that he loves ponds. He has two of them. The larger is home to families of feeder goldfish he rescues from the pet store. It took him seven years, but he finally established a colony of frogs as well. There are some eight or ten of them judging by the splashes every time we approach the backyard. The other pond is more of an afterthought. Home primarily to algae, it is so small that fish can’t survive well in it. My husband persists nevertheless. He lost his five-year-old goldfish last winter, the lone survivor of a class of 12. Sad.
No gardener is cut precisely from the same cloth when it comes to what they are willing to struggle to master---or why. Here’s to the guys who garden!
