Some of my friends are talking about their garden/yard/landscape and how they would love to have them. Some of them are landscape architects, and they know what they are talking about. The others, on the other hand, make me feel like saying out loud ‘Yeah, dream on, dude!”.

The thing about having a garden is, you have to have green fingers, and plenty of time for maintenance.

If you don’t have both, then what you need is a couple of hundred bucks per month to pay your gardener.

Sure, the visit to the nursery is exciting and overwhelming. You start to imagine having those Generalife (Alhambra) gardens right in front of your door. The colourful flowers, the green leaves, the butterflies, the dragonflies.

But the plants you find in the nurseries are well taken care of by their landscapers. Unless you have green fingers and leisure time (like my mother), go ahead and plant away. My mom could toss mango seeds and lemon grass by the kitchen sink and they grow healthily. Unfortunately,  green thumb isn’t hereditary.

So I guess I’ll just resort to some hardy foliage plants, and plenty of pebbles and gravels. What about a rock garden? Perhaps.