The fact that for three years I spent every Saturday and Sunday morning scouring Southern California for horticultural treasures indicates a high level of interest and enthusiasm, not obsessive behavior. Alright, perhaps it borders the obsessive threshold. However, the fact that I bought a 7-seat minivan for the purpose of sliding a complete garden nursery into the back doesn’t mean I slipped on the banana peel; it means I plan ahead. Actually, the minivan was the result of a peek inside a huge Ram utility van that had two bucket seats in front, two rows of bench seats, a large storage area at the rear, and something resembling an aisle access to the bench seats. I felt it was the ideal vehicle for our family at the time. My husband could drive the van; each child would have an entire bench on which to stretch out yet not be able to reach and torture one another; the pets could bounce around in the back; and I would have easy access via the aisle in case I felt the urge to get up and give any of them a good whack. Once I saw that van, which my husband declined to purchase for me, I was a ready customer for the brand new concept called “minivan.” It was a Dodge Caravan and it was all mine, which meant I was the one who had to drive everywhere. Therefore, it seemed perfectly logical that I should be selected as the chief wrangler in our posse of plant rustlers. I had the van; I could seat all five of us, with a full storage area left for trees, shrubs, pots, and clippings. I lost you somewhere, didn’t I? See, before I started collecting cups and saucers, and after I finished collecting beads and jewelry making supplies, I fell in love with horticulture, only I didn’t really know what that meant. It took an accidental trip to England and France to introduce me to the art of growing roses, which bankrupted me and ended up turning our 1940s cottage into a make-believe English Tudor you couldn’t enter because of all the bushy trellises in your way. One of my best friends loved gardening. She particularly loved English gardens. And roses. And traveling. She loved to travel. So one day she called up, all excited, to tell me about a wonderful tour she discovered. Five days in London; five days in Paris; day trips included. Without having a clue about what the trip really involved, I said, “Sign me up!” It turned out this was a pilgrimage for rose growers. The day trips included visits to all the famous rose gardens and private lectures by noted rose breeders at their exalted nurseries. One busload of people who thought they knew everything about roses, plus me, who knew nothing but was riding along because the friend said it would be awesome. It was awesome. Some day I’ll tell you all about it, but the main point for this tale is that I came back determined to own at least one of every type of rose bush known to mankind. Gone were the Azaleas, Camellias, and other shrubs that did well in my microclimate, and in went the roses. The first thing I did in caring for these new treasures was everything. Seriously. Every book, advertisement, product review, whatever they said to do, I did it. That meant I was mixing toxic pest control products that killed every living microbe in the dirt with homemade fishmeal spray and other ecologically sound practices. Needless to say, the first year’s crop was sketchy. Eventually, after going to as many lectures as I could squeeze in between the requisite five minutes per day on each and every bush, I realized that there were two ways of thinking. More like two camps of enemies. On the one hand, there was RoundUp and all it represented, which is modern man’s method of wiping us off the planet. Then there was the organic method, which was attempting to ensure the survival of the human race. I became an organic purist. This involved a lot of fish and bone meal, bags of various minerals, a wheelbarrow in which to mix my soil food, and sturdy gloves. If you’re going to do something, you may as well do it whole hog. It wasn’t entirely all about roses. Oh, no. Vegetables were included. So was just about everything else. This is where the Plant Rustler part and my minivan comes in. The traveling rose enthusiast friend lived across the street from a woman friend who wanted to turn her San Fernando yard into a plantation. She lived next door to a male friend who was growing his own Zen garden complete with waterfall and koi ponds. We were not hoarders. We merely had very dense landscaping covering every square inch of available dirt, pots, trellises, eaves, and in my case, custom-made redwood planters on our driveway, in front of the garage, which was fine because my husband was a hoarder and no one could get into the garage anyway. We four, plus my husband who had no interest in gardening but liked getting out of the house, would pile into the minivan, head to literally every garden center in Southern California and return with the back of the car piled to the roof and more potted plants teetering on feet and laps. It’s a good thing the vehicle had side mirrors because the rear mirror looked like a Monet painting. Every once in a while, we’d drive by a garden or an empty lot and we’d see something growing that we didn’t have, so we’d stop and investigate. If no one was looking and if the plant had escaped the confines of a yard and was growing into the public footpath, we would clip a sample to propagate at home. Alright, four clippings, because what one had, all four needed. We dubbed ourselves Plant Rustlers in order to ease our guilty consciences. Nature got even with us for our greed. Once the mystery plants took hold, they took over. Nothing could kill them. I’m talking Morning Glories that suffocated gigantic palm trees, Honeysuckle that buckled the sheds they covered, Trumpet Vines that knocked over cement fences. Learn from me folks, skip the plant rustling part and just move on to soil propagation. My mission was not to feed my plants above ground, although I did that with topical sprays compounded to suit the PH balance of each leaf. My main objective was to feed the soil and the little microbes that lived therein. I turned into Farmer Jane, out every morning to spend an hour tending my flock before going to work. Five hours were allocated to the garden every Saturday and Sunday, squashed in between walking through public gardens and shopping at garden centers. By the sheer weight of the organic compounds, fertilizers, mulch, compost, fish poop, and TLC, I managed to transform our local clay soil into rich loam that fed exotic plants from the Himalayas and shrubs sprung from the Mediterranean coast, side by side. My brother-in-law the gardener was stunned when he saw cabbages the size of giant pumpkins. He asked how I did that. I told him. He left talking to himself. Pretty soon the non-rustled plants started taking over as well, I mean like blocking the sidewalk, covering the windows, and tripping guests who tried to enter the palace to wake up Sleeping Beauty. Desperate measures were needed. So I ripped out everything and planted other things to take their place. My husband used to ask me why I was always planting, nurturing, then relocating plants only to put something else in the now-vacant hole in the ground. I ask you, isn’t that what all plant lovers do? I had to do that. I mean, ground cover roses are supposed to get no higher than twenty-four inches, right? Not at my house. At my house, with soil so arduously enriched, ground cover meant tea rose size. Tea rose meant orange tree height. Climbers meant over the roof. My experiment with soil management was a huge, and very expensive success. Something more had to be done. My three year mania was close to expiration date and I was getting very tired. With the little strength I had left, I hired strong men to yank out all the roses. I gave away dozens, but soon ran out of friends and strangers who would accept them so I turned ruthless and decimated the English Jungle I’d created. Then I retreated indoors and hired people to fill in all the blanks with miniature Indian Hawthorns. They require little water, less food, no attention, and survive the hottest days of our Southern California paradise. Now my house looks like the 1940s post-war popup it was always meant to be. The yard is classic: a few Azaleas that are dying because I stopped feeding them acid food; a sad and lonely Camellia; a bug-infested Hibiscus that refuses to die in spite of my best efforts, and one hundred healthy Hawthorns. The gardeners prune them once a year. Nature does the rest. I no longer pull weeds. Life is good.