Paul comes in from work last night and the first thing he asks me is if I've kidnapped Marge Simpson.

I give him my stunned "say what?" look (which is only slightly more stunned than my normal expression) and he drags me over to the kitchen window to look at a plant I bought yesterday.

So what do you think? Were Marge Simpson and my new Blue Skies delphinium plant separated at birth?

Hmmmm.

Well, that plant was just one of my many purchases yesterday. Spent the day chasing down plant wonderfulness with my friend Gail, another gardening addict.

Some women, when they're blue, will buy themselves new clothes. Some will splurge on spiffy shoes, whilst others come home with new bits of make-up.

Silly, deluded women. They've got it all wrong. The only place you can buy everlasting joy and happiness is a garden center. It is The One True Path.

Can I hear you say, "Amen?"

Yes, brothers and sisters, emotional salvation can be yours if you visit a garden center. Just yesterday I hit the garden sales hard and bought me $60 worth of everlasting joy and happiness (EJH--acronyms, what this diary has been missing and by crikey I'm going to remedy THAT oversight right this minute!).

Only now I have to find a place to park all that EJH until next spring when I re-do some garden beds and add my latest leafy insights into the on-going garden gospel according to Marn.

This means I am going to have to clean up the Bed I Have Been Trying to Ignore This Year, the other bed by the wood shed. There may be blood. It will probably be mine.

See, this bed has been overrun by ferns.

I know what you're thinking. "Ferns, Marn is worried by FERNS?" You non-gardening types can scoff all you want. I know you think I'm a wuss, a b�b� l� l�, but anyone who knows plants knows that ferns are to be feared. Ferns are among the earliest plant forms--heck, these things were around when the dinosaurs still ruled the earth. Do you think that something that has kicked dinosaur butt isn't able to spread a world of whup on my sorry derri�re?

So, it's pick and shovel time chez Marn this weekend, as one middle-aged woman takes on a flower bed full plants that survived when dinosaurs couldn't.

Now there was a moment ? there was a moment yesterday at the garden center when my hand hovered over a container of Round-Up. It's one of those quick action herbicides that everyone says is safe--use it and 24 hours later it's all supposed to be all gone.

I know it works, I've seen it in action along the side of the road in Vermont. But I haven't ever used anything like that here and I never will. Organic gardens R us up here. Stupid, huh?

I mean, think about it. Late last weekend an arsonist torched a factory in Vermont upstream from where I live and enough copper sulphate (among other chemicals) has been dumped into our river to kill everything in it that breathes through gills. Everything.

My house is 1/4 mile up the side of the mountain from that river and the smell from the rotting fish is so bad that it occasionally wafts up here. Environmental emergency teams are down there trying to get all that rotten fish picked up before the water gets utterly polluted with e coli bacteria. This is a nightmare.

So in the face of that kind of pollution, what does it matter if one person adds a little more?

Really, when you think about it, what does any of it matter? Me dragging two or three compost buckets of food bits a week out to my composter doesn't keep that much out of landfills. The bottles, newspapers and other goodies I motor into the village's recycling center when I do my groceries probably hardly make a dent.

But when everyone in a community does it, it does make a difference. You should see how much stuff is kept out of landfills even in tiny villages like this each week by people who are willing to make an effort, one person at a time.

If the theory of evolution is right, we are, to quote a TV show I saw recently, descended from crap tossing tree dwellers.

Do we have to act like it?

Put this rant down to crankiness. It's hot, it's humid, the air smells bad, a beautiful place I love has been screwed over and this weekend I will spend six or seven hours wrassling ferns out of a flower bed because I can't bring myself to poison them.

While we're at it, let's blame that eight generations of Methodists in my family. I shed the faith but one of the hymns seems to have stuck ? something about how one person's actions matter, something about "you in your small corner and I in mine."

Why do I remember this old hymn? Pish and tosh, I'd much rather know all the words to "Dancing Queen".