The Inadvertent Gardener

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information. And happy birthday, Mom!

So here’s the thing. Out in my back yard, there are these amazing tulips coming up. And they don’t have anything to do with me, because I didn’t plant them, and yet every year, they’ve come up nonetheless, like little workhorses that don’t know what else to do with themselves, and so it’s like spring is here but it didn’t even ask me for permission.

And that, good people of the Interwebs? That’s what I really like. Gardening without even trying.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Once I determined it was time for a little life in the hanging plant arena, the next step was to figure out what to shop for. Last time I asked for suggestions, I got some good ones, but that was all for Fall plants, and, well, let’s not talk about Fall. I’m still in recovery from winter, after all, and so plan to relish the warmer weather of Spring and, yes, even Iowa’s celebrated hot-and-humid summer.

My friend Amy was visiting for the weekend, so I dragged her to the closest Earl May to peer at flowers. “This one’s pretty,” I said. “Do you think it’s a trailing plant?”

“Sure,” she said, with not much more conviction than I had.

The label confirmed, though, that the plant would allegedly trail. It was a container of Million Bells in a color riding the rails between pink and purple, and I snagged the healthiest looking container of lavender bacoba to stick alongside it. I loved my white bacoba last summer, and I know for sure that trails.

Did you hear that? I know something for sure about gardening. Bacoba trails. So there.

“Is that going to be enough?” Amy asked.

I stared at the two plants in my hand and tried to visualize the hanging basket. I figured with room to breathe, this ought to be about perfect, but suddenly my confidence ebbed.

“You think I need more?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said.

My confidence returned. “This is good,” I said.

Plus, it was $10 worth of plants. That’s plenty for the hanging basket.

Inside the garden center, I tracked down an actual employee, and held up my plants. The weather was still a bit frightful, I said, and I wanted to ensure I could actually keep them alive if we got a sudden cold snap. She told me to bring the basket in when it got cold, and I nodded solemnly, fully aware that the reality is I would probably forget. But for just that moment, she and I believed that I was a conscientious gardener. One who remembers to water her hanging basket in the first place.
After Amy took off for her return journey home, I took the hanging basket out back and got to planting. The flowers nestled in together, replacing the dead plants I tossed in the compost bin. And when I hung the basket up on the front porch, it seemed that finally, Spring had arrived.

Although I have professed my love for the flowering trees of D.C. (and, oh yes, that does include the cherry blossoms), I’ve got to admit – I never spent much time when I lived there thinking about their symbolism.

I mean, the cherry trees? To me, they symbolized the hurray of Spring, and they symbolized that the traffic around the Tidal Basin was about to grind to a halt, and they usually symbolized we were about to get a raw, wet, nasty day, generally timed to directly coincide with the National Cherry Blossom Festival’s long-planned parade, that would knock all the delicate blossoms to the ground as if they were snowflakes.

So I perked up, last May during my visit to the San Francisco Botanical Garden, when Gordon Wilson, the docent leading my walking tour, started explaining what the cherry blossoms meant to the Japanese.

“They used them to indicate when to start the rice seed,” he said. “When the trees bloomed, it meant a period of warm weather was coming.”

According to Gordon, the next step in the process came after a specific iris (and although I was taking notes, I didn’t get the name of this one) bloomed as well. That indicated a period of wet weather would be coming soon, so that’s when the rice farmers would plant their crop.

See, this is the kind of gardening marker I can get behind. When this very visible thing happens, start the seed. When this very visible thing happens, plant the seedling. This doesn’t require hoping that the almanac is going to hit the last frost date accurately this year, or require searching old blog posts and weather.com for indicators of when the weather might turn.

Just blossom: start. Blossom: plant. Very simple, and beautiful, to boot.