can a condo have a garden?

The seller of the second house I'd offered on was not so impressed by the price I was willing to pay. This is too bad, but fair. I don't believe that goods or services have a single "market value". They're worth different amounts to different people. In this case, the house is worth more to the seller than it is to me. The main reason for the discrepancy is location. While the house is a block from a good elementary school and four blocks from the lake, it's a mile and a half from downtown. For a lot of people this would be a great, but for me it's a compromise.

So, trying to take some sort of lesson from the experience, I thought about whether I wanted to live right downtown. There are condos for sale in my price range, and one of them even appeals to me (the track lighting would have to go, but otherwise it's nice). But in making the offer on the other place, I'd done a lot of fantasizing about outdoor spaces, and I find it hard to let that go.



When I think of a perfect backyard, I inevitably think of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I like gardens to be overgrown, with leaves spilling everywhere, swallowing up moss-bitten statues and crumbling structures. I like 'em romantic, suffocatingly so. I see plants everywhere that survive Austin's dry winters with and remain stubbornly bucolic in appearance, and I can't imagine it would be hard to build a wild backyard of my own. In a condo with no balcony, I'd be giving that up.

That doesn't mean no plants, though. It probably means no climbing plants, unless I want to ruin my walls, but there are plenty of plants that can grow indoors, including palm, citrus, and fig trees. I think it would awesome to have a staged forest behind a beaten-up velvet or leather sofa.

The reality, though, is that I'm slowly killing the only houseplant I've ever owned, a philodendron. This means any kind of indoor garden I might substitute for the traditional kind needs to be undertaken with immense caution, lest piles of dead leaves and broken branches take the Miss Havisham effect further than I'd intended.