Flower Hoarding

I don't normally get into online arguments, especially now that vegetrollians have gone away to start eating meat again or scolding people for--well, practically anything nowadays. But something set me off the other day and I finally realized why.

A poster on a forum asked how he could cheaply obtain several hundred rose starts to make a giant rose garden out of an uncultivated piece of ground at his house. I love roses, I've grown a lot of them, and know what's required to grow them. I asked several questions about cost and maintenance of such a project and pointed out potential pitfalls, all of which he waved away, even though he mentioned he was on a budget.

For anyone under the delusion that gardening is a dainty hobby, a garden this size typically has a crew and a professional horticulturist to plant and take care of it. Annual pruning alone would take one person two solid weeks of stoop labor. And since rose gardens went out of style with bridge games and Tupperware parties, such an artifact would make his house harder to sell. Worse, the idea for a bed of fussy hybrid teas tends to appeal to people who remember the 50s--in other words, someone who'll be unable to take care of a large, fussy garden either now or in the near future, the view from the neighbor's houses and the person who has to remove a weedy briar patch be damned. And that's assuming rose rosette virus, a devastating, easily spread rose disease, doesn't find its way in.

I wasn't one of this person's neighbors, nor someone who'd have to clean up the ensuing hellscape. So why did this bother me so much? A mental checklist helped sort it out.

Older person: check.
Collection of random, cheap, easily available stuff: check.
Minimal maintenance planned: check.
Eyesore in the making: check.
Lowered property value: check.
A huge mess someone else will have to clean up: what I went through with my parents' hoarding.

I finally realized that this was just a plan for a plant hoard.

I can see the future. From Dreamstime.

My parents' house was on a large lot and they eventually got to the point that they couldn't take care of it--or the house or eventually themselves. And yet they refused to move. With good intentions, I helped with the yard. I spent hours pruning some overgrown roses and bagging up dead canes, a project that will leave you hot, sweaty and looking like you tried to bathe a cat. I know well what rose gardens look like with minimal care. Helping them with everything they needed wore me out and took up most of my time. I wouldn't do it again.

The whole attitude of hoarding is narcissistic. It's their stuff strewn everywhere, no matter how it looks or how much it burdens other people. And now the trend is crybullying.

If I see an article about a man making a stink because the city is threatening to bulldoze his rose garden, I'll know the back story and I won't be surprised.

Comments

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Infrared Light: How much is too much?

It's the sort of thing that sounds like quackery: a pad with tiny red LED lights and a few buttons that's supposed to help you heal, just $30 on ebay. I never would have bought it, but Dr. Davis gave a presentation on infrared light late in 2024. Since I was still suffering from achilles tendonitis after being floxxed , I decided to try it. I wrapped it around my ankle and turned it on the lowest setting for five minutes. Nothing seemed to happen, but the next day, I wrote, My tendonitis is GONE after one 5-minute treatment! I didn’t feel it doing anything, I didn’t think it was going to do anything (at least not that quickly), but for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten out of bed and started walking normally and didn’t have any pain reaching with my left arm. I'd been shuffling around like an 80-year-old woman after getting out of bed in the morning. The tendonitis returned, but it was improved. I eventually had physical therapy for it, and now, apart from a l...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Gym Influencer Doubles Down and Should Have Regretted It

Jennifer Picone isn't the most abusive gym influencer--far from it--but she may be the most annoying. In a video she posted that went viral, she was working out in a gym when another member appeared in the background by the free weights. The member was minding her own business, not looking in Picone's direction, when Picone got up and told her to move. After filming, Picone edited the video with a note about "Gym etiquette lesson #47" and accused the other gym member of "[doing] that 💩 on purpose." Shaming other gym members has gotten to be such a big genre that Joey Swoll has a YouTube channel, with half a million subscribers, dedicated to calling out these content creators. Just for Picone, he took a break from his vacation to tell her to mind her own business. This may be the first time that Joey Swoll has taken one of his followers to task. The fact that she follows him and still doesn't know better than to treat the gym like her personal studio sh...

Stay in your car!

If there's ever a lunatic outside your vehicle, do not engage. Stay in your vehicle. Drive away or call the police. Drive over the curb, lawn or median if necessary; just avoid putting innocent bystanders at risk.* Save yourself from lunatics like a boss. Screen grab from video by Fredrik Sørlie on Youtube . That advice might have saved a 69-year-old delivery driver from being attacked by former NFL player Mark Sanchez, who for unknown reasons was in an alley after midnight in downtown Indianapolis and decided to pick a fight over a parking space. I say might have because I haven't seen any video of the attack. But other incidents over the years bear out the safety of staying in your car. A neighbor was assaulted and robbed after she got out of her car after someone followed her home and blocked her driveway. And remember Reginald Denny from the LA riots? The victim maced and stabbed Sanchez, but suffered a bad cut to his face and tongue and looks like he was badly beaten. Bo...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog