Not Quite Annual
Newsletter 2026-05-08
Plants are the kingdom of life with the greatest disparity between overachievers and outright slackers. An interconnected colony of aspen trees called Pando is arguably the oldest organism on Earth, clocking in at an impressive 80,000 years old. Meanwhile, petunias have trouble making it through a single summer. Clearly, not all chlorophyll users were created equal. I’ve written at length about the perennials I’ve added to my garden over the years, many of which come back with little to no effort from me. (We won’t talk about the ones that were supposed to come back but didn’t. My compost pile is a crime scene.) But there’s another class of plants that die as fast as they can so suckers like me can be tricked into buying them year after year. Welcome to the scam that is annuals. I used to fall for it every spring, but I’ve taken a few planting seasons off purely by accident. It’s amazing how fast “I’ll do it tomorrow” turns into a three-year gap. In the years when I planted annuals, my house looked like something out of a Disney movie for one month and a horror movie for the rest of the summer. With the help of my children, I hope to once again enjoy those short term benefits and that long term shame. This weekend, the girls and I are going flower shopping. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to literally lighting money on fire.
Of all the embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of the world, the names of plants is perhaps the worst. You might have noticed how I constantly write about the elm trees we cut down, even though they were killed by the emerald ash borer. If you asked me what ant eaters eat, I’d tell you it was potatoes. I think most of the annuals we planted in the past were petunias. They’re not exactly known for their heartiness. If you look away from them for more than thirty seconds, they die from a lack of attention. It was either that or because I stopped watering them. The jury is still out. For years, we bought hanging baskets to display on hooks above our front porch. When the flowers were alive, we had the prettiest house on the block. When they dried up, our place looked like a set piece from The Walking Dead. Wilted flowers are a key decoration for any show or movie set in the zombie apocalypse. Every expensive plant is dead, but the lawn is still perfectly mowed. My theory is that the undead are actually omnivores who graze on grass when there are no tasty humans around. Adding a zombie or two to your property could be an environmentally friendly alternative to a traditional mower. Yes, it could speed up the end of the world, but it could also save you a few gallons of gas. At current prices, I’d say that’s worth it.
As with everything I try, I always start out watering with great diligence. I even rope in my kids. Lucy is especially good at helping out. After a few weeks, she forgets, or I do. Then we leave town for a short trip or I’m distracted by a shiny object. My DNA is roughly forty percent raccoon. By the time I remember I’m supposed to be watering the petunias, they’re dead. Naturally, I give up on all hydration at that point. That’s usually when I discover they weren’t as dead as I thought. They quickly go from dead to super duper dead. They were parched, but now they’re ready to burst into flames. The only thing to do at that point is hide the evidence. According to some people on the internet, that’s where I should have started.
I came into suburban culture as an outsider. My parents were born and raised in farm country, and I’ve never lived in a subdivision. We’ve always been behind the curve on things we’re supposed to be embarrassed about in polite society. Thanks to our Catholic roots, we reserve our shame for the important issues, like eating meat on the wrong days of the week or being born at all. In my days on Twitter, I read some suburban discourse that said plastic hanging baskets were an eyesore. I was shocked. Not shocked enough to change any of my behavior, but shocked enough to feel judged for doing something I thought was actually good. I expect condescension from others for the condition of my grass or for owning more than zero pigs, but adding a decorative element to my house that looks nice during the two weeks I remember to water it seemed like a net benefit to society. I have much to learn about homeownership. By “learn,” I mean ignore. If anything, the internet’s judgement made me like plastic hanging baskets even more. I’m the easiest person to manipulate with reverse psychology. Please don’t tell me not to jump off a bridge. Or do tell me, depending on how well reverse psychology works on you.
The real reason I stopped buying hanging baskets, other than that I put off buying them for too long multiple years in a row, is they got too expensive. I don’t make fresh-flowers-in-a-basket-with-a-hook money. I’m more likely to buy them by the flat, which seems cheaper until you factor in the work involved. That’s why I had so many children. In theory, I should have an unlimited source of free labor. In practice, I have an unlimited source of frustration until I do the labor myself. We have a few large planters out front and a wire flower box along the windows on one side of the house. Those are the hardest flowers to water because they’re so high above the ground. Unless I pull out a ladder, which I will never do again after planting them, I can only hydrate them by launching water at them from below with a hose. This unleashes a torrent of planting soil down the side of my house, which I then have to wash off with even more water. In years when I plant in that flower box, I use more water than a data center. The environmentally conscious thing to do would be to leave it empty. My laziness is actually highly ethical. Someone please tell Lola.
There are bigger threats to my flowers than drying out. Beside the same alley where a car recently demolished a utility pole, a truck pulling a trailer once ran over a planter of my petunias when trying to make a turn.
