Somewhere that's green

Cue music:

A matchbox of our own

A fence of real chain link,
A grill out on the patio
Disposal in the sink
A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine
In a tract house that we share
Somewhere that's green.

That’s from the musical Little Shop of Horrors where Audrey dreams of her ideal suburban life. But that’s me as well as I long for a little place of our own and some pretty gardens. The problem is I can’t grow anything.  In the US they say successful gardeners have a green thumb and in the UK we say you have green fingers. Whatever you call them--I don’t have them. I can whither a plant stone dead from 50 paces just by thinking about it. But I long to be a green gardening gal like my dear old mum who has the complete opposite effect on plants. When one knows she’s in the vicinity it perks up and does a little dance. Seriously.  

 My friend Lena recently gave me the most adorable gift I have ever seen. It was a little matchbox shaped like a house. It’s tiny! You opened it up and inside were little bits you could cut out to accessorise your house.  It’s crafty!  It also had a packet of cress seeds that you could grow to give your little house a garden. It’s green!

click on this so you can see it bigger and really appreciate the lovely details of the house and garden

Look how adorable that is! I added a bicycle and a steeple to my house to personalize it. After all we do live at Church House so it needed a steeple! And look at my cress! It’s growing like mad. I was really scared it would fail to grow. Only I could fail to grow cress. Pre-schoolers everywhere grow cress because it grows so darned easy. But Pre-schoolers have better gardening skills than I have so there was a chance this might end in disaster. Thankfully, it did not.

 I spent the first several days like Toad in Arnold Lobel’s children’s classic Frog and Toad Together shouting, “Now seeds, start growing!” and pacing up and down. Then suddenly one night I noticed a few seeds had a teeny green shoot coming out and the next day over half did. Cress grows really quickly and my garden is a couple of millimetre taller every day.  This may be the first successful thing I managed to grow in my life.

Thank you Lena for the adorable house and wee garden. Growing a bit of green has made me very happy indeed.