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Garden: Fail

Posted in Featured Articles, garden tales, general gardening

Anemones Just Look Dead

The anemone bulb story has some of the same theme. Early in my garden career, when living in the city, i was so new to gardening and so eager. I bought things because the labels looked pretty and didn’t pay much attention as to whether it would grow well, or be hardy, or anything like that. I had the cavalier attitude and the chutzpah of the new gardener with a few successes under my belt. I could grow anything.
I didn’t always account for time, though. In the frenzy of fall season, when the aisles were full of bins of bulbs from Holland, I picked up a package of Anemone coronaria de Caen. Yes, the ones with those impossibly gorgeous colors. Anyway, somehow they got tucked away somewhere or another, and didn’t get planted. For the entire winter, in a heated house. And if you have ever seen these little corms in the best of times, you know how wizened and unpromising they look. Imagine after a good seven months or more, because when I found them in June, I was about to throw them out and decided on a whim just to throw them into the bed of mixed annuals I was planting that summer- so off in a corner they went, covered in earth.

I sort of forgot about them, to tell the truth, because I really didn’t expect them to grow. Low and behold, though, one day the little leaves curled out of the ground and I will never forget the wonder and amazement I felt. I had given them up for dead, and more buried than planted them. But life revived… and I took away an indelible impression on my mind of the power of a living thing…even deep inside a dried out old corm. I suppose this seems pretty mundane to most people, and I’m not so easily impressed these days, having seen how powerful a thing the lifeforce is. But then, it was an epiphany, and I am sure it helped to lead to my experience with the pine tree so many years later.

So, there you have it… a roundabout type of explanation of how a gardener can have so many obvious failures and yet still find the hope and optimism to plant in another season…because as all gardeners come to hope: Next year it will always be better.

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