My Beautiful UnGarden

I'm not a gardener like Cindy or Megamom. At 61, I just don't want to go back to playing in the dirt like I did when I was younger. Sure I'd love the fresh veggies...well, maybe next year...Naaah.

I guess what you could say is that I do natural gardening. Natural flower gardening that is.

This photo is of the west end of our back yard. I allowed the Wedelia to take over there, not allowing my husband to mow it down. I did allow him to mow a path around that edges so I can walk the dog in my "Garden."

Wedelia is also known as "creeping daisy, and most folks here try hard to get rid of it, but it is just so marvelously beautiful when it covers an entire meadow (we don't really have meadows here, but this will do.)

How can anyone walk through this part of our huge back yard and not feel happy? It brings me peace. It takes over a yard real fast, but I'm hoping by next time this year the entire backyard is full of the tiny little bright yellow daisies. I even picked some of the flowers and threw them into what should be a flower bed in front of the wheelchair ramp in hope, no, knowing full well, that it will take over and next year I'll have a pretty yellow flower bed out front.

I just realized tonight that the whole wedelia thing is sort of a symbol of my whole life. I find beauty in the way natural flowers spread out over my little peace of heaven. Just the way I've found beauty in the 21 kids we've raised or are still raising. They aren't the healthy white infants that most people want to adopt. But they are truly more beautiful because of how they were born. I love them just the way they are, just like my creeping daisies.

And like the wedelia, we let our family keep growing and spreading. No mowing or pruning-like those families we meet who always say, "I don't know how you do it. I only have two and they drive me crazy."

And this human garden has given me much more than green peppers and tomatoes. Thank you, God, for both my natural gardens.