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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 3, 2008

It really doesn't pay to get too cocky about your garden.

Because just when you think you've got it looking right, that you wouldn't change a thing, something is bound to happen.

Every time.

This time, it happened to one of my favorite features: the arbor by the pool. A week ago, it was a showpiece, with two lush bougainvilleas, a coral and a pink, crisscrossing over the top.

Then a couple of thunderstorms rolled through and toppled the poor wooden arbor. Both times. It cracked in two places. So did the pots the bougainvilleas were growing in. The whole mess had to be cleaned up, and quickly.

The plan: Keep the plants intact while surgically removing the arbor, then slide a new arbor underneath and repot the plants.

Crazy as that may sound, it would have worked - we were that close - until I realized the roots of both bougainvilleas had popped through the bottoms of their pots. They were growing deep, deep, deep into the ground beneath and under the sidewalk. Despite our best efforts to carefully dig them up, it was not to be. We ended up chopping the whole thing down.

"Think of it as a blank canvas," my optimistic husband said, when he saw me pouting in the empty space, surrounded by the massacre.

"You can see the lake now. It opens things up. And no more thorns."

Whatever.

I'd woven each one of those thorny branches through the slats in the arbor until they grew, literally and figuratively, over the top. It took three years to get the effect I wanted. It took two storms to knock it all down.

The new metal arbor is sturdier. The new pots are prettier - and bigger. The new vines - two yellow mandevillas - are lovely.

It will all be OK. Really it will.

It's just not OK right now.

Kim Franke-Folstad

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