This is an something I wrote in June but never posted.
_____________
I want to plant a garden. Or rather, I want to just get a few seeds and see if I can grow them into plants, especially flowers. I spent a fair amount of time looking through lists of common perennials and annuals, then googling images of those flowers to determine which ones were the gaudy little annoying ones sold at Shopko and Menards. I don’t like those. It turns out, however, that impatients, begonias, marigolds, petunias, and the like have their uses because few other flowers can carpet a space fully enough to give a bed-like feel. They’re rather like fat crayons used to color in blocky, large areas and capture the eye through sheer riotous number rather than delicacy or unique elegance. Elegant flowers are those like tweedia caerulea, whose name really doesn't live up to its beauty, lobelia, gentian, balloon flower. Southern star. Jasmine. Nicotiana is beautiful. There are so many and the only way I can explain how I feel when I think of them is almost like a dragon thinking about its hoard.
I also want to grow a flowering houseplant in my apartment, for when the dreary greyness of winter sets in. I’m thinking of a peace lily or another type of lily but one that preferentially has color. Edgar, my unknown plant at the apartment, is apparently a jade plant or a heartleaf rhodendendron, a plant prized for hardiness and ability to filter air. Not just for carbon dioxide but also things like benzene derivatives. So Edgar’s a pretty good plant. In sum there are three plants at my apartment: Edgar the rhodendendron, my sensitive plant, and the small basil-ing. There’s also the begonia? geranium? that I grudgingly water.
While I do greatly enjoy reaping the benefits of vegetables (i.e. picking the ripe vegetable), I think I like gardening flowers more. Because to grow a vegetable is to eventually sacrifice it to your consumption, whereas flowers can be eternally consumed with sight and yet preserved--or preserved as long as they are naturally intended to be preserved.
Which branches off into another thought-topic, naturalness, but that’s for another think.
Anyway, if you’re growing basil or lettuce or bok choy or kale or any leafy plant whose entire body (?) gets consumed, then you have to destroy something you’ve become attached to. I guess you could think of it as not destruction but rather returning energy to your body or some zen like that but in the immediate level of analysis you are tearing up what you put energy and care in to. I find that hard. Even when we grew basil last year in the garden, lots and lots of basil, I still didn’t really like breaking off the tenderest shoots and tops for cooking. And I really love basil in food. Like, really really love it.
But tomatos, cucumbers, beans, etc are a little different. At least then what you pick is separate from the entire plant. Granted, what you’re picking is the fruit of the plant and what it devoted all of its energy toward developing, as well as its hope for future reproduction. Wow, consumption of any living thing now sounds harsh to me. Too bad one can’t subsist off of non-living things. Kelly said something funny about that. Biology is the study of organic living things? That may have been it.
The thought of growing a garden is tied into growing a garden of my own though, starting from scratch and planning it out in my house. I’m very good at mentally starting projects because I love the blank slate (and blank notebooks, blank sheets of paper, etc. I guess I love possibility and newness most) but carrying through becomes difficult.
For now, I just want to get some seeds and grow something. I want to see the process unfold, of nothing but blank dirt at first, then the shoot, the cotyledons, the graceful tiny plantling, growing, youthful, mature, flowers brilliant. I want to see how easy it is to produce life and beauty.
_____
The only thing that's changed is that the basil-ing has passed on, as well as the begonia. Instead I now have a fuzzy African Violet and a battle-scarred aloe vera, poor thing. It battled gravity and lost. Also there's no winter flower yet. I have seeds!
No comments:
Post a Comment