This is a post in which I will rant a little, and rave a little, and possibly use a few swear words, and I have the distinct feeling that most of you will understand where I'm coming from.

Remember last week, when I shared my plans for expanding the veggie-growing capacity of my ever-evolving side yard? And how I mentioned that this is the best it's ever looked, with morning glories covering the chain link fence and cukes and bush beans growing happily along the ground and up the fence? I remarked that it is "charming without trying to be." What I hope you got from that post, what I said without saying it, was that it made me happy. That every time I looked at that part of my yard, I'd nod to myself, and think, that's what my garden is supposed to look like.

So you can imagine the heartbreak when I took the kids outside one afternoon late last week to see it had mostly been ripped out by the neighbor on the other side of the fence.

Where gem-like 'Grandpa Ott' morning glories greeted the dawn, there was nothing left but rusted chain link and the remains of the stems that clung on to the last. Where lemon cucumbers had scrambled up onto the fence, there were the remnants of what the neighbor couldn't reach to pull out. All that remained were the things that couldn't easily be reached from over the fence.

Carnage. Complete and total carnage.

I probably had something akin to murder in my eyes, because my husband immediately went into "let's avert a neighborhood war" mode. The neighbors (who, I might add, have a pile of garbage and weeds taller than the neighboring garage growing all over her yard....) had a handyman over that day to mow the lawn and take care of a few other things. Apparently, ripping out all of the plants on the fence and leaving the huge tree-like weeds in the rest of the yard was on his to-do list. I promised not to confront the neighbor directly. It is true---we have to live here, and neither one of us is going anywhere for some time to come. And it's not clear if it is her fence or mine. I'm pretty positive it's mine, but I still have to track down the surveyor's drawings to be sure.

So I didn't confront her directly. But I do believe I've made my displeasure known. It's easy to do when people have their windows open and you launch profanity filled rants about people's ugly-ass yards who screw around with plants that are actually improving the neighborhood rather than making it look like shit, and how if people got their lazy asses outside once in a while to weed the parts of their yards that actually need it, they might start to appreciate how much work it takes to make a garden look good.

Yes, I was quite pissed.

In true Colleen fashion, after the anger died down, I cried. Is it pathetic to cry over plants, and annual plants at that? It might be, but it is what it is. When you take time to nurture something, when you've looked at it daily and watched it evolve from mere seeds to full, lush, colorful plants, it's personal. And only a gardener would understand that.

I want to revisit the "whose fence is it?" issue, because it's really the only thing that kept me from marching over there and launching a full verbal tirade against this particular neighbor. As I said, it may not be my fence, and if it isn't, she was fully within her rights to rip stuff off of it. But what this comes to is a basic difference between gardeners and non-gardeners. As a gardener, if a neighbor put a bunch of love into growing something on the fence, even if it was my fence (which I wasn't using for anything) I'd be thrilled to death to have something pretty covering it. If I saw this neighbor out weeding and watering and planting day after day, the very last thing I'd do would be to rip it out without a word of warning, letting them make the grim discovery after the deed was already done. That is just not something you do. There is something so wrong about that that I can't even begin to understand the reasoning behind it.

Maybe I'm looking at it too much from a gardener's point-of-view, and maybe that is the problem. The world is not full of gardeners, unfortunately. The world is full of people who don't give a rat's ass about beauty or life or the health of the planet. It's full of people who think that beauty lies in swaths of lawn that never end, that all it takes to get there is hours of mowing and the magic of chemicals from a hose-end sprayer. In general, it's full of people who just don't get it.

Thank whatever deity or force of nature is responsible for creating gardeners. The world would be a pretty ugly place without them.