An elegant garden is very nice. Very nice indeed.

Seeing what they do at Phipps Conservatory to incite the senses and the smells can give you a rush.

In fact, just visiting a nursery at Home Depot and Lowe's or the recent May Market can get the juices flowing for flowers.

I often wonder how many people there are like me, people who love digging in the dirt but whose gardens aren't elegant and aren't full of varieties of plantings with names I can't pronounce.

In my garden I planted the lilac tree (which is looking a bit spindly, but it had lots of fragrant blooms this spring), the three forsythia, all the astilbe, somewhat sparse azaleas, a tired rhododendron and the male and female holly bushes, among other things.

I won't mention the plants and shrubs I've lost. My dogwood needs a medic.

However, this garden is mine, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

My garden never had a plan. It never went by proper arrangement -- short in front and tall in back -- and a landscaper has never put a hand to my layout, except for the square cement blocks which created a patio where grass once grew 20 years ago.

With two dogs at the time, the grass was rapidly losing its desired green. It wasn't emerald, it was becoming chartreuse.

Weeks before Memorial Day, when the first green specks appear in the brown dirt, you are smiling. It's still too cold to dig but you're ready.

The smiles are mixed with frowns, of course, but rebirth and renewal, which gardening brings into play, are anticipated and celebrated.

I don't learn a lot from my gardening mistakes. I don't seek experts regarding proper soil, fertilizer or read how-to books to create the most admired garden on the block.

Those who do are rewarded. I'm just not one of them.

I don't know my soil's acidity level. I don't mulch. I'm just not that kind of do-it-right gardener.

I like what I like, and that's about it. What I like most are the weeks leading up to the time I will sit in my chair and see the outcome of my hours bent over, leaning into, adding to, purchasing, pulling out, sprinkling, ruining, creating and caring.

These have been the weeks of joy. Mostly it's the anticipation. What have I done right? What have I done wrong?

But in the end, who cares? The effort, the relaxation, the appreciation of nature -- I think of all these things as I watch petunias multiply, hostas pop up in places I forgot, a bleeding heart somehow moved from there to here, miraculously re-seeded with no help from me.

There is a story going on in each of our gardens, and they needn't be magnificent.

The magnificence is in the obsession -- to want to dig in dirt and marvel at what develops.

Surely, in spite of my lack of real knowledge, I am seeing clematis climb and bloom as no other year. I don't know why.

My Stella D'Oro day lilies rebloomed the past five years in planters, but not this year. I don't know why.

If everything came back year after year, plush and more plentiful than before, where would the mystery lie?

Now I look for shade plants. I didn't used to. If I liked a flower I bought it, planted it and hoped for the best.

I still guess at "Full Sun," knowing I don't have it in my garden. I gamble with nature.

If something dies, and I ask someone better informed about gardening why it didn't survive, invariably I am asked, "Did you feed it?"

Well, of course not. I put it in the ground, or in the planter, and expected miracles.

I've been working in a garden for years, this particular one for 28 years. My fingernails are just recovering from my abandon in digging in dirt minus gloves, which I find awkward.

In the midst of plantings are other things I love: dog sculptures -- a beagle, a Lhasa, a Lab, three cocker spaniels. They belong.

There's a white metal heron sitting on a piece of driftwood from Stone Harbor, N.J., a cement frog under an umbrella which belonged to a favorite aunt and some words on hanging plaques to guide me daily: LIVE, LOVE and GONE TO THE BEACH.

I like the quote from Lady Bird Johnson: "Where flowers bloom, so does hope."

Reason enough to have a garden of any kind.