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I am a deadbeat gardener.

My flower beds have not experienced love or attention for weeks. The hostas are bloated, tired and burgeoning on morbid obesity. The lilies are being asphyxiated by creeping vines. Some insidious wild violet has spread throughout the entire plot, shading out the wooly thyme and choking the periwinkle. The forsythia needs pruning. The peony died before it bloomed; potato bugs now feast on its withered corpse.

The woman who owned my house before me was a dedicated gardener. I inherited the fruits of her labour: a sizable perennial patch in front and a charming perimeter bed out back. Evidence of her earthy maternalism was everywhere, from the sea shells scattered whimsically under the lilac, to the sunken flagstones out front.

Apart from a short-lived organic vegetable patch in my university hippie days (which was rudely pillaged by my schizophrenic neighbour), I had never had a garden before.

Instead of being daunted by the task, I was inspired: Here was my chance to improve my life - and character - for the better. Instead of being a burnt-out, jaded, crackberry-addicted, walking, talking, wine-swilling manifestation of the Cartesian split, I would be a wise and balanced lady writer with a garden. Like Margaret Atwood, I would spend my mornings tapping out intelligently acerbic swaths of history-making prose and my afternoons happily rooting among the tubers and contemplating where to place my new marble bird bath (shipped over from Rome by my sexy Italian editor). I would wear floppy hats and clogs and smile wryly at my neighbours, raising a garden spade in wordless greeting. People who passed would say, "Look, there she is gardening again. What a humble and unpretentious pass time for a genius." I would offer them clippings of my snow in summer, make small talk about squirrels digging up daffodil bulbs and not waste a moment worrying over my chances at the Nobel. Who needs a prize when you've got a healthy hydrangea?

That was the plan.

Like so many tragic failures, I started out with the very best intentions. Every spring the ice melts, and my will to live returns. With it comes the optimistic urge to drive to the garden centre and load up the trunk with expensive, tricky- to-care-for perennials, bags of mulch, hanging baskets and pansies for pots. May and June weekends are spent in a state of muddy bliss, making sketches, digging holes and ripping out weeds the moment they raise their pushy green sprouts.

But as the warm season pushes on and summer stretches itself out over the days like a purring cat, I begin to feel just a little bit ... lazy.

I start going out of town on weekends and cranking the AC during the week. The notion of squatting in the dirt pulling slugs and grubs off stalks and stems begins to lose its allure. A cold glass of Chablis on a restaurant patio around the corner, on the other hand ...

Does it really matter, I wonder, if I deadhead the pansies in the pots? They still look lovely all leggy and wild. Who wants tamed pansies anyway? And is anyone going to call the police if I allow the clematis to overtake the sweetpea? It's a Darwinian universe, after all. The sweet pea needs to learn to fight it's own battles. And is it really the end of the world that wild burdock has shaded out the rare and expensive yellow rose bush? Who says burdock isn't pretty? And would it smell as bland by any other name?

These are the dark rationalizations of the budding deadbeat gardener.

Once I start letting things go (usually around the second week of July), the cycle of shame sets in. I am horrified by the state of my front garden, but I don't want to go out there in case my neighbours see me. So I avoid the front entrance and leave through the alley, thereby ensuring the front garden never gets weeded. All my grand spring plans for backyard barbeque season are similarly scuppered (how could I have anyone over when morning glory has entwined itself all over the patio furniture?). Instead of basking in the glorious high summer, I barricade myself indoors, pull the blinds, and wait for the winter to come - and with it, my will to live.

If there were social services for perennials, my day lilies would be taken into custody, my sweet woodruff sent away to a foster family (probably one with a big suburban lawn and a dutiful stay-at-home soccer mom). As it stands, however, no one is equipped, or willing, to intervene. Through the crack in the blinds, I see my neighbour's pursed lipped looks as they pass the wooly jungle that used to be one of the prettiest gardens on the street. "Look," they say, "she's neglecting her garden. Typical self-absorbed writer."

And really, who can blame them?