I've decided to take the month off from writing about politics. What's the point? There's nothing I can do about the state of the world. I'd rather discuss an area in which I can have an effect on my environment.

I'm talking, of course, about gardening.

For the past two decades, I've been learning to garden. So far, I have just about figured out that if you put a plant in the ground and water it, it will sometimes grow.

When I lived in a cute little cottage in England, I had visions of being surrounded by beds of giant delphiniums and lupines like you see on Masterpiece Theatre. Instead, I had sagging, decrepit roses and a little patch of nettles. The problem was that having a quaint English garden required buying a lot of plants, putting them in the ground, and taking care of them. That aspect of gardening didn't interest me. I just wanted to gaze at a glorious display of natural beauty and, if the weather was good, which it never was, do a little weeding.

I spent several years living in rented houses in the Takoma Park/Silver Spring area, and while they had nice yards, I could never get up the necessary motivation to do anything with them. My house in Takoma Park was surrounded by vines that were so thick that when people came to visit me, they would invariably seize a pair of rusty shears and try to hack them down for fear that my daughter and I would end up like the people in "Sleeping Beauty," who were surrounded by a forest of thorns as they slept for a hundred years. All I can say is, it sounds good to me.

Things got so bad in my Silver Spring house that, at one point, the landlord hired some guys to rip out all the grass, which was no longer really "grass" per se, and lay down sod. (Longtime readers of this column will deduce that this was the result of one of my most heinous sins, "Inadequate Lawn Care.")

The sod looked nice for a few weeks, but then the crabgrass and weeds moved back in.

This is the way things work, I thought at the time—life can be going along fine, and everything is green and verdant, but then insidious forces begin to work their way back into the land, destroying everything that had been laboriously constructed—but I said I wasn't going to write about politics.

When I moved into my present house five years ago, there wasn't much of a garden. The previous owner had planted those hideous bushes that landscapers use to take up space.

When I ripped them out, which I did immediately, I discovered that he had also set down layers of plastic sheeting under the top layer of soil to prevent weeds. This meant that when I dug to put flowers in, I would spend hours picking little rotted pieces of non-biodegradable plastic from the dirt. But because I was now a homeowner, and this was My Dirt, I did this. ("It's called soil, not dirt," my husband always tells me.)

At first, I made a number of gardening errors. I put too-tall annuals in sun/shade zones, which caused them to grow too leggy (note my use of Gardening Jargon) and then keel over. I planted what I thought were cute purple coneflowers and discovered that they were towering yellow things that fell down when they reached maturity.

Last summer, I made a really stupid mistake: I noticed that there were ants crawling all over the peonies, and I sprayed them (I know, bug spray is evil, but I had visions of ants invading my house and removing all the furniture as I slept). Then, after the peonies never opened, I found out from reading a column on gardening, that the ants carry necessary something-or-others to the peonies, and without them, nothing can bloom.

My neighbor, let's call him Sal, had a good laugh about this. (All my neighbors are keen gardeners, which is to say that the guys next door have planted lots of hostas inside discarded tires.) Sal told my husband that some idiot down the street had actually sprayed his peonies because of all the ants. My husband and he laughed uproariously about this, and my husband, bless him, never told Sal that I had done the same thing.

Sal is an ardent Republican, but my husband avoids discussing politics with him; instead, they discuss home improvements—Sal is an interior decorator—so neither of them mentioned the irony of the fact that someone can go in with lethal apparatus, such as bug spray, and commit acts of destruction that lead to unforeseen negative consequences—oh, sorry, politics again.

By far the most difficult portion of my garden is the ivy that covers the stone wall in front. Every year, I try to get rid of it. (My neighbors with the hosta-tires poured bleach on their end of it one year.) I go out with my shears and chop it down, but it turns out that ivy loves being "cut back," and this just makes it grow more enthusiastically. My attempts at subduing it only serve to inflame it, and as I stand there hacking, it sends forth things to get rid of me—clouds of wasps, swathes of poison ivy—until eventually I back off, only to hack another day.

As I tug on the ivy, I have fears that one day it will seize me and hurl me into the path of an oncoming truck.

After all these years of slowly learning to garden, I thought I had made some progress, but this year I committed what has been my most idiotic gardening blunder to date: seduced by discounts and coupons, I ordered $150 of plants by mail. This is probably not a good idea under any circumstances, since the plants arrive when you least expect them and you don't have time to put them in. Some of them, it turns out, are not "plants" at all, as we know them, but root systems, and they come with no instructions to tell you which end is supposed to be up.

In the best of times, this is inconvenient, and not as much fun as going to Behnke's and buying whatever catches your eye. But this year, in this season of constant downpour, it was a complete disaster. My plants sat on the porch as the rain fell around them, suffocating in their little plastic bags, and every so often I thought I heard tiny voices crying for help.

When it finally stopped raining long enough for me to plant them, they were probably all too mad at me to want to bloom, so now I have huge blank spaces in my flower beds as I watch to see if the roots will turn into plants or will just lie there and rot.

This just goes to show that sometimes you can pour a lot of money into something that you think will be a solution to the problem but turns out to be—oops.

While it cannot be said that I have a green thumb, I am a patient person, prepared to wait as the seasons cycle by, with the optimistic view that no matter how bad things look—how barren the soil, how gray the sky—eventually, the goodness in nature will prevail and something will bloom.

Next month, it's back to politics.