Garden vs Yard

Some people have gardens, others have yards.  I tried to call my non-built-on green space a garden, but it just isn't working.  There is no garden to it, except for the flower bed with the crocuses.  The rest is a weed-infested jungle that I want alternately to prune, transform into a real garden, or let rip with the napalm and concrete over the ashes.  In an ideal world, I would have tamed the space into something serviceable, with a little herb garden, some roses, maybe a shrub border, and a nice path.  Even assuming I had no day job, I cannot morph into the combination of David Bellamy and Martha Stewart required for the task.  The best I can hope for is for the grass to outnumber the weeds.  It doesn't help the yard was left untouched for eighteen months while the owner rehabbed the house.

And then there are the trees.  Three hulking great cottonwood monsters, gearing up to rain white fuzz on the neighborhood for weeks on end.  They're twice as tall as my two storey house.  They're ugly.  They drop leaves and branches at random intervals.  They have a root system that covers the state of Missouri.  And they will be very expensive to remove.  I had not thought it possible to hate a tree, but I'm getting there.  Just wait until fuzz-raining season and I'll have a full-blooded loathing for the things.  I want to destroy the one closest to the house, I can tolerate the other two.  But that will have to wait.

What started this yard-related rant is the possibility of having said yard exposed to the world.  We are going install a shining, new, and above all straight fence, instead of the drunken leaning disaster we have now.  To do this, the old fence will get ripped out, exposing my gardening failures to the world.  I have a massive gardening inferiority complex caused by my mother's stunning transformation of an eighteen-months-neglected yard into a glorious garden, with flowers scheduled to bloom from snowdrops and crocuses, through to lilac, roses, and those odd orange flowers with four petals and pale stems.  She put in a rock garden, filled with alpines and other rock loving plants.  The lawn has a razor sharp edge, and is mowed in proper diagonal stripes.  There is a flourishing herb, fruit and vegetable garden in the back.  I cannot compete, and pretty soon, everyone will know.