Metro Pulse/Midpoint

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Planting requires faith

by Stephanie Piper

I spent a recent weekend planting bulbs, rushing to beat the Arctic Express that will surely follow this spate of balmy November days.

It came to me, kneeling there in the damp grass, that I was performing a small act of faith.

My gardening ability is questionable. My eyes glaze over when I read instructions like "first, cultivate the soil to a depth of eight inches. Mix in mushroom compost..." I like to pick flowers but I hate to weed; I love to fill the house with exuberant bouquets but I hate to water and spray.

So my planting always has an element of chance about it, a certain hit or miss insouciance. Good gardeners know how to bide their time, tend their beds, prune for maximum yield. Me, I tend to wing it.

The results are unpredictable. A bumper crop of cherry tomatoes thrives on neglect while carefully cultivated asters wither in days. The exotic lilies I took some pains with emerge yellow-leaved and scrawny; the rudbeckia, thrown in as an afterthought two years ago, now runs riot every summer.

There is no logic to my gardening, so it's probably foolish to expect logical outcomes. But that dogged element of faith remains, reinforced each spring by small miracles of green shoots in the snow, crocuses sprouting in unexpected places, snowdrops pushing their way through the frozen ground.

It's more than plant persistence that intrigues me. It is the potential hidden in unlikely wrappings. Brown, onion-like bulbs, stuck into the dead ground, produce colors, petals, foliage. Winter branches black against the sky hold secrets of leaves, of shade. No wonder the ancients spun myths as they watched the earth darken and the days draw in. No wonder they invoked ritual to bring back the light, the green fields.

A favorite book of my childhood was a sentimental little volume called The Flower Fairies. I liked the pictures of gossamer creatures curled up around the roots of roses and daffodils, gently shaking them awake each spring. They seemed far more appealing than ministrations of mulch and bone meal and careful attention to package instructions.

Faith and patience are not subjects addressed in most gardening manuals, but perhaps they should be. We spray and fertilize and plant, but in the end, it's not really up to us at all. Maybe that's why spring always seems like a present. My father, who worked for the Reader's Digest when I was a child, had a favorite story about the magazine's co-founder. A woman of strong opinions with an unerring eye for beauty, she decided one spring day that she would like to see apple blossoms from her office windows. She ordered an entire orchard in full bloom transplanted to the front lawn. The results were spectacular, but it always seemed a bit unfair to me. She had missed the stirring of sap, the first tentative leaves unfolding.

She had missed the act of faith, the patient waiting that defeats the darkness.