CONFESSIONS OF A GREEN(ISH) THUMB

“Wow!  Those are beautiful flowers!  You have such a green thumb!”

I have heard this compliment a time or two in my life and I tend to smile and say thank you, but if you’re watching you will also see me shaking my head a little too.  Yes, they are pretty flowers, and yes, they are growing in my garden, but believe me, it’s Mother Nature who knows what she’s doing.  I just add water from time to time and hope for the best.

I do come from a long line of certifiable green thumbs.  My grand mother knew not only the Latin names for the domesticated species of flowers in her garden, but for the native plants we would see during a walk across the pasture as well.  Hers was a busy life, a farm wife, a writer, a caretaker of her invalid mother-in-law, and someone who cooked and canned everything on a wood burning cookstove.  I don’t recall her having big flower beds when I was little but she kept up extensive correspondence with friends who developed new varieties of roses and lillies.  During the few short healthy years of her retirement her home was surrounded with color and fragrance.  The most glorious Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis) I’ve seen was just outside her door.

My mother took her own interest in plants and ran with it.  I think every spring she had Dad prepare a new space for yet another garden, and then he built her a small A-frame greenhouse which soon wasn’t big enough so a larger, commercial building was constructed, and then added on to.  To this day when I walk into the moist, earthy atmosphere of a greenhouse I get a whiff of my childhood.  I can also recognize most of the plants mom grew and sold and know that too much water is more likely to kill them than not enough.  This hardly rates me the title of Greenthumb.

Now I’m the one with the large yard and gardens and a handy husband who provides me with the appropriate machinery needed to till and mow to my heart’s content.  He has even gone the extra mile to haul gigantic rocks into the yard and landscape them into a hillside garden for me.  This loving act of generosity is evenly balanced with his insistence of tucking our well (in the middle of another flower bed) in for the winter with a covering of straw (and a billion weed seeds) every fall.

He's also built me my own little greenhouse to play in, but this does not qualify me as a green thumb either.  Mostly it’s a handy place to keep the mess out of my house.  Someplace to keep the baby plants alive until I can get them outside and Mother Nature can take over.

It’s late October now and I’ve been putting summer things away.  The annuals have been pulled, the tulips and daffodils have been planted, and the deck planters have been emptied and stored.  I feel like I’m a little ahead of the game because I actually thought to draw a map of where I’ve planted things and listed which flowers I want to plant again next year.  I put these maps and notes in the greenhouse so maybe I’ll be able to find them.  Again, this is me ahead of the game.

The final job was to dig up the dahlia tubers and store them so we can enjoy them again next year.  In 50 some years of gardening I’ve only ever successfully overwintered these roots in one place, the crawl space in our basement.  It’s a nuisance of a job so I was quite pleased with myself and feeling very accomplished down there until I spotted a brown paper bag with the words “remember you have an amaryllis, Jocelyn!” printed on it.

 

Of course I had forgotten that I had an amaryllis, and the poor thing had done its best to strive toward the sunlight and bloom.  A ghostly white scrawny stem had emerged from the stapled-shut bag, God knows when, and produced some kind of pathetic flower.  Major fail on my part but Mother Nature is unstoppable – when I opened the bag I found that the bulb was going to give it one more try!  Another ghostly white shoot was already two inches tall.

Who knows if this is for the plant or my guilty conscious, but today’s project is to give it a bigger pot, fresh soil, access to daily sunshine, and adequate water.  If it makes it I will place it with the orchid and four Christmas Cacti that are also blooming despite being in my care.  Mother Nature is amazing!

Me, not so much.  Feel free to remind me that I have plant notes in the greenhouse about February 1^st.