Six Reasons Why Everybody Should Garden
1. Gardeners glow with good health. This is a consequence of time spent outdoors evicting poison ivy and double-digging borders, as well as of a healthy diet of home-grown squash throughout most of the year. The average gardening day leaves one well-exercized, pleasantly sore and dirty, and far too tired to go out.
2. This is why gardeners make better lovers.
3. Gardeners grow erudite. Did you know that barrenwort (Epidemium) was named so in the (sadly mistaken) belief that it had contraceptive properties? Or that turning a bleeding heart flower upside down and pulling it open indeed reveals a tiny naked lady in a bathtub? This is the kind of information that many gardeners have at their fingertips, which makes them brilliant conversationalists and much in demand on the party circuit. Gardeners also know many more useful (and more boring) facts about botany and horticulture.
4. Gardeners become art connoisseurs. This is necessary because every garden is an artistic creation. Although every gardener may not be an artist, nature teaches all gardeners, sometimes in difficult lessons, why certain colors don't enhance each other, why some may be combined in endless pleasing variations and why a few additional combinations cause acute nausea. At the minimum gardeners learn about line, rhythm and repetition in the patient arranging and rearranging of plastic flamingoes, garden gnome statues or evergreen hedge plants.
5. Gardeners make wonderful friends and relatives. They spend most of their free time working on the garden or dreaming about it, and thus have no time or energy left for unpleasant arguments or nasty fisticuffs.
6. Nothing is easier than selecting a birthday present for a gardener. A state-of-the-art greenhouse, for example, is always well received.