By MAUREEN GILMER, Scripps Howard News Service

Believe it or not, creating a first vegetable garden is like furnishing your house. For interiors you may go to showrooms filled with a vast array of brands, styles and sizes made by contemporary manufacturers. Or perhaps you spend your time perusing antique and second hand stores for vintage finds.

"This volume began back when I was a boy of 6 or 7 and oft visited my grandmother's home in Gladwin, Michigan. All along the Sugar River, on both sides, grew venerable old bushes of lilacs my aunt and uncle had planted for Grandmother. How she loved lilacs. In bloom they were a marvelous sight. Heaven must be something like this, I thought."

I'm a flower glutton.

Old-timers spray watered-down raw egg on their plants. As the egg decomposes, the smell keeps deer away.
Someone else spreads bone and blood meal around to create the smell of death in the garden.
Hunters tend to sprinkle predator urine to ward them off.
A neighbor even creates tangles of fishing line that confuse a deer's senses, particularly at night.

At what point did shopping morph into a recreational activity? When did we become a nation of shopaholics? Was it the birth of the great American mall? Was it earlier, when the Industrial Revolution drew our population from the farm to factory? Or maybe the roots of shopping go much further back, to a more primitive time when women gathered -- not from stores but from nature and the garden.

While helping curator Clark Moorten clean up at the Moorten Botanical Gardens in Palm Springs, Calif., I saw it for the first time. Dusty and dog-eared, the Cactus and Succulent Journal seemed to leap out of the dark with its incredible photography.

Long before Gregor Mendel's groundbreaking work in plant genetics, the cloth weavers of England were changing the primrose. Workers who had woven textiles collectively fell in love with Primula auricula, a finicky European alpine species that they grew in little pots. The small perennials could be enjoyed outside the window on a shelf or in a window box.

Some of the best marriages result when you cross a slash-and-burn person with a bean counter. These very different approaches to life complement each other for a sustainable, well-rounded partnership. The slash-and-burn personality is spontaneous, energetic and gets things done, but is likely to overlook details.

I've thrown away thousands of color slides because the light wasn't right, the image was crooked or it was simply too far away. That cost me big bucks because I bought expensive film, and sent it out to expensive processing. Often only a few keepers came with each roll, and the rest of them were garbage.

It was a Depression baby introduced to the United States in 1929.