By Shannon Williams
The song, “Where have all the flowers gone” is a song about the futility of war and the cycle of life and death. These days I can so relate, as gardening is becoming an exercise in futility! I have always had a garden of some sort, ever since I was a child. My mom would always give me a little spot and I would try my best to grow what I could, but never much happened, I loved playing in the dirt and most of all I LOVED FLOWERS! I had African Violets in my first dorm room and worked to care for them and had some luck. I got a job at a florist in my later years in college and loved going into the vaults with all the flowers and just being among them. I no sooner had signed the lease on my first apartment that I brought a gardenia plant. I had spent the summer in Hawaii, house sitting for my great Aunt and fell in love with gardenias, how I thought I could grow a gardenia in West Texas I will never know, but I kept it alive and even got a bloom or two. I did manage to have my wedding bouquet be full of gardenias!

This year has been very hard on us garden types, first it all a freeze again!! I did manage to save some of my plumeria, but lost all of my hibiscus, including two lovely double blooms! This is the third time in my 10 years of living here that I have had to put in a garden and I have a small one just under my stairs. The cost just keeps getting higher, but I can hardly stop myself from buying plants each year. So, after I put a new garden in, it is burning up! If you call me these days and ask what I am doing, most likely the answer will be watering or fixing to go water the plants and no matter, they are still just struggling to deal with the heat. I feel like I got such a short time that everything was pretty and blooming before the fight began. I celebrate blooms of any kind but they are getting few and far between. I told my husband that I won’t put in another garden, but who am I kidding, we all know that come March I will drive to several nurseries to get plants, not to mention HEB and Walmart. It is not my fault that they now carry plants, I have to go there anyway, and the plants just find a way into my basket!! Gift cards to Lowes and Home Depot for Christmas are one of my favorite gifts as we all know it is going to plants!

I think it is the very cycle of life that I love so much, when they bloom or better yet, give you a great tomato, it is such joy, then you watch them die off, but knowing that next spring blooms will come again! I have always loved to drive up to my home after a long day and see pots of flowers on my front porch, it just makes most any day better and helps you to forget the ugliness of so much of the world these days.

As my mother’s dementia takes her further away from us, we can still talk about flowers. We are very lucky in that the home she lives in allowed us to plant some trees outside her window to bring birds for her to watch. We talk about gardens and flowers most every call. I send pictures to family members to show her and always have a slide show when I go to visit of what my garden is doing. This spring, when I was visiting, she told me how much she missed flowers; well off to Walmart I go to buy a couple of the pre-planted flower pots to put outside her window. We already had someone who would water her trees, so I thought I would just add a few pots to her little garden. My sister called me this week to let me know that the flowers had all died, the heat and rain storms were more than they could handle. It is truly the circle of life. I am going for her birthday soon and will replace the pots with more flowers and hope they last a little longer.

I have an orchid on my kitchen widow sill, it is one from Trader Joe’s. I have killed a few of them, but this one manages to carry on. Just when I think it is done, I see a little bud! I also have managed to keep a shrimp plant going this year and finally got a butterfly bush that is going great guns, so I will enjoy these, keep watering, all the while looking forward to fall plants. Life is a cycle and it is a rough one, but it always starts over for us to enjoy.

[Jul-18-2023]