Monday night I came home with a hatch full of Turner-grown greenery, gifted to me by my mom, who just keeps finding things she wants me to try in my yard. I went over all the special instructions in my head (put this in dirt as soon as you get home, apply some rootone to this but shake off the excess before planting, the seeds in this bag will mold if they get any prolonged moisture, etc.) as I unloaded the car in the dark.
Among my haul:
• Two more hosta to fill out the green/variegated/green/variegated pattern I’ve got going in the azalea bed and the back shady bed.
• A stick that my mom swears up and down will become a hibiscus shrub if I just love on it enough.
• A boatload of small green bits of forsythia.
• An itty bitty pinch of hens-and-chicks.
• A clump of mums (mom can’t remember which color they will bloom).
• Three things I will be able to name once I talk to my mom:
________ (some flowering shrub with rootone on it to see if it will start).
________ (some small long-leafed plant with a thick barky stalk).
________ (some tiny volunteer thingies with split leaves and webby bits in the middle).
• Two hanging pots, one of which has a volunteer zinnia in it.
• A volunteer oak tree that is about five inches tall, parent acorn still attached.
• A big Ziploc bag of second- and third-generation marigold seeds from plants deadheaded by my mom.
• A smallish bag of second-generation zinnia seeds, also deadheaded by mom.
Today I was out, planting the new stuff and checking on everything else, and I noticed that my hydrangeas are starting to bloom. All winter and spring I have wondered what color they’d be. We’ve got some bouncing baby blue blooms! Which, actually, I bet I probably already knew because I bet they were still blooming when I first started looking to buy the house in October. Either way, it still felt like a surprise once I saw those little yellow beads give way to blue petals. I can’t wait to see the entire bushes explode in blue.
I had to dig up some wygelia (this is how my mother pronounces it — “why-JEEL-iya” — and yet when I google what I imagine it’s spelled as, Google asks if I mean “weigela,” which I would be able to tell for sure if I could read the freaking phonetic alphabet. So are these two spellings for the same plant? I get hits for both.) that just wasn’t making it down by the road. I’ve been watering it with grave seriousness for a week now, and it looks pitiful and wilty, and not just in the pouty way transplants tend to act sometimes. My mom suspects strongly that she did not bring enough of the roots with it when she dug it out of her garden to bring to me. Oh well. I put some forsythia in its place. I am going to be overrun with forsythia, I just know it. I’ve heard all about how its low-hanging boughs like to root themselves when they finally touch the ground, and then grow up and out and touch the ground again to take root, over and over and outward and outward, like some kind of super-slow-motion plant Slinky. I’m watching you, forsythia. Watching you hard.
A few weeks ago I emptied my two long, rectangular pots of the snapdragons I’d planted (which I moved to the front bed), and I hadn’t put anything back in them. I haven’t grown a single thing from seed this year, so I decided to see what those marigold and zinnia seeds might do. I’ve got two pots of each now. I’m not crazy about marigolds, as their smell kinda turns my stomach, but I do like the idea of growing flowers from seeds harvested from flowers my mother has grown and harvested for the past three years. As for zinnias, well, they are pretty and they don’t smell like cat pee (silly marigolds), so I hope they all bloom with great urgency and then stick around as long as possible. And then I’ll do it all over again next year.
I noticed a bough on my bleeding heart had broken, so I stole the seed pods off of it and bagged them up. I have to wait until fall to plant them. There is something about having a little packet of seeds stashed away that makes me a bit giddy. Aunt B wrote something a while back about the nature of seeds, and I am totally there with her. It’s magic. Science, yes. But also magic. Like, ICP-level magic.
The bittersweet thing with gardening is the waiting. I have put so many things in the earth this year that, for now, are very small and unassuming. But some day these things, if they take a liking to the soil, that is, are going to make themselves known each spring without subtlety. I’m having a bit of trouble imagining what the landscape of the yard will look like when my tiny tiny redbud babies go from three-leafed sticks to big beautiful trees whose roots dig ever deeper toward permanence and whose blooms will no doubt pose again and again for me when I come clomping outside with my infernal camera. My neighbors must think I am a freak, what with all the constant photographing of everything.
Anyway.
It is a commitment to make, to decide that you will put something in the ground and then stick around to watch it grow up, knowing full well it could take years and years for the full effect to emerge.
It’s really the most permanent thing I have decided to do in a long time.