DEFINE GARDENER

We took the back roads into Austin yesterday, and it was the most depressing drive we'd ever taken -- nothing but dead brown everywhere you looked, and this was not an area that had been burnt!

This drought has everything looking like it's the middle of a hard, hard winter, instead of it being the tail end of summer.  Of course, the creek has been dry for months now, which isn't unusual here.  But the trees!  First to go were the shallow-rooted crepe myrtles, seen through the oak in the top photo.  Now the cedar elms and some red oaks are turning and dropping their leaves, and even our bullet-proof boxwoods, which refused to die when we actually tried to kill a few!

The "waterfall" on our creek.

What did my hubby do when we reached Austin?  Why, he filled up our truck with two or three hundred dollar's worth of brand new plants of course, then went back to the feed store for a load of potting soil!

So how would you define "gardener"?  Well, that's just another way of saying "eternal optimist", isn't it?