It's not lying, exactly. It's more, um, truthiness.

When I write about my gardens, I try to present them in the best light possible, because, well, I love them.

It's like writing about your kid or your pet, in a way.

Little Johnie has just discovered boogers and is mining his nose as if there's gold in them thar nostrils. Little Johnie has also learned to lisp his alphabet. Which fact are you, adoring parent of Little Johnie, going to highlight?

Or, uh, you've taken Rover to the dog park where he promptly buried his snout up to his eyebrows in the derri�re of a fetching poodle. When the poodle's owner extracted Rover, much like you extract a cork from a wine bottle, the buzz from the poodle butt encounter led Rover to promptly hump the leg of the poodle's owner.

There are many ways to frame this, but love for Rover could lead to the happy news that Rover made friends with a poodle and her owner at the dog park yesterday. The fine details of the encounter are, uh, overlooked.

Hey, did I tell you that my daffodil meadow is now in full bloom?

And yes, it's every bit as spectacular as it seems. The perfume from it on a still evening is extraordinary.

Only, uh, well, the fact is that in the middle of it is all the spousal unit's trash treasures which were stored in the woodshed that we tore down in January. Bits of wood and construction materials he hasn't moved yet to a new storage area.

If you took in the whole meadow, that bit of ugly that I mentally edit out for the sake of my marriage would be front and center:

See that stone wall in the upper right corner of the picture above? That sort of dark black line in front of the daffodils? I stood in front of it and shot down the daffodil meadow for that first picture so that I could, uh, massage the truth.

Is the meadow beautiful? You bet. Is it perfect? Nope, not at all. It will be next year, though, or the headline in the local weekly will read, "Middle-Aged Carpenter Murdered By Spouse in Daffodil Fueled Homicidal Rage."

Love can only go so far, eh?

There's not a lot to see in the long perennial border I'm working on. In the foreground you see some of the weeds and plants I've been carting away and in the distance you see the results of clearing, composting, and turning the soil.

Veteran gardeners know instantly that I'm making a huge mistake leaving those big clumps of daffodils in the bed�they're a hiding spot for weeds and bits of perennial plants I don't want. If I try to clear them out too much, I break off stems and damage leaves, so I have to largely leave them alone. When the daffs die down I've got major grief ahead of me. But in the early spring, when the world is mostly beiges and tiny bits of emerging green, the daffs explode into colour I'm not willing to sacrifice.

Grief it is, then.

When I go on walkabout around the yard to see how things are doing, the cats trail along with me. They're very careful to keep a good distance because heaven forbid they should ever give the impression that they like me, or want to hang out with me. They are cats. Cats walk by themselves. Cats don't need no steenking hewmans.

Somehow, on this morning's tour, Miss Banana lost sight of me. Up on her haunches she went, doing a frantic scan over the daffodils. The sound of my camera zooming in helped her realize that I was a fair distance off to one side of her.

Chagrined by the notion that she may have actually tipped her paw, that I might actually know that she was somewhat fond of me (or at least interested in my doings) Miss Banana quickly dropped to the ground. She began to frantically lick her nether regions, implying that her butt was far more interesting than I am.

No there won't be a cat licking butt picture.

There is only so much unmassaged truth I can bear putting out there in one day, eh?

--Marn