Envy

It's with good reason that someone who's envious is said to be green with it. No one knows about envy more than gardeners.

Look in any garden catalog and it becomes immediately obvious. Plant descriptions are rife with catchphrases like "eye-catching", "spectacular", "unusual", "exotic", "striking". New varietals are shilled with the implication that you could be the first in the neighborhood to grow them.

Luckily most gardeners are good-natured about it with fellow gardeners. After all, there are so many thousands of plants out there, which can be grown in near-infinite combinations, that there's no difficulty in having a garden totally unlike any other. Every garden is a unique expression of its creator. We can't be truly jealous of another person's garden, because we know that any attempt to recreate it in its entirety would be foolish. It would be like wearing someone else's jeans; those jeans may look fabulous on them, but if you were to wear them they just wouldn't fit right.

Good-natured or not, that seed of green envy is always there, and if anything it spurs us on to do even more with our own yards. There's no shame in admitting it, and channeling it into even greater efforts on your part. Or at least that's what I told myself when I ordered my Franklinia alatamaha anyway.