Marigolds

Some families gravitate toward one type of flower every year. My family, on my father’s side, have a tendency to buy and plant geraniums and pansies. The is because pansies were our grandmother’s favorite flower, and she was able to keep her geraniums growing throughout the winter inside the house.

Every year I buy pansies and geraniums and decorate my front porch with pots of them. I’ll admit they start out hardy and hale, but as the summer proceeds they begin to get weedy, brown, and not so perky. I’ve even tried to keep my geraniums in the house over the winter like my grandmother did. They never made it to spring.

One summer I tried everything to keep my plants alive and thriving, I read books, I bought Miracle Grow—for the specific plants I had: tomato, pansies, violets, all-purpose. I wasn’t any more successful than years before that. On the other hand, my neighbor had the most lovely window boxes of pansies one could ever imagine. I would look at my flowers and then at her’s and ponder where I go wrong caring for plants.

At the end of the summer, I finally asked my neighbor what her secret was so I could perhaps, just perhaps, grow as lovely a garden of flowers the following year. Starting out fresh sounded like a good plan of action. My neighbor laughed and reached out to “pluck out” one of her pansy plants for me, and I was horrified. I told her not to give me one of her lovely plants because I was sure to kill it, especially since winter was arriving. She merely gifted me the plant, and found out her secret—it wasn’t really a secret to growing lovely plants, it was a secret that her lovely plants were all plastic. I had been fooled for years by her window boxes.

One year I came home from a meeting and noticed a huge weed had grown on my side lawn, between my house and my neighbor’s yard. I was horrified by how I had missed noticing it when I mowed my lawn, or coming and going. I do have a tremendous ability of grown weeds, it’s the flower and vegetable plants that seem to wither under my watch. Give me dandelions, and I’m spectacular at the enormous crop I can grow and harvest in my gardens and lawn. What I noticed was the big-granddaddy of all weeds, right there on my lawn.

I went directly to my garage and got all my tools and sprays to eradicate that big sucker of a weed, once and for all, before it spread farther, and into my neighbor’s yard. Just as I was about to attack the enormous weed, my neighbor came around her house and shouted to me “Don’t chop down my forsythia plant I just planted!” What? This was a real plant?

That’s part of my problem. I can’t tell the difference between a real plant and weed. Dandelions are yellow and lovely, even have fluffy fun heads that blow in the wind. They even are edible, but many do everything to eradicate them from their lawns and life. I’ll admit my grandmother banned me from her garden because I couldn’t tell the difference between real flowers and plants, and weeds. I spent my youth mowing the lawn because I was so inept at gardening.

I remember buying all sorts of seeds to see what plants I could really grow throughout the summer, since pansies and geraniums didn’t seem to be my forte. I discovered I had luck with three kinds of plants: Portulacas, Lavender, and one plant I never had a seed for, a marigold. That marigold was the hardiest little plant I ever had. I don’t know where it came from, and I know I hadn’t planted it, especially after harvesting the seeds it produced. This same miracle happened when I was young when I planted carrots (because they were my favorite food) and onions grew up where I had planted my patch of carrots.

I have come to suspect that friends and family members secretly put plants and seeds in my garden which I can’t possibly kill, like my neighbor who planted a forsythia plant in my side yard. I have been blessed in that way. Through the kindness of others I have been given a love for plants and flowers, even if I can’t seem to grow them myself.