Blooming Where We are Planted

The growing season is late this year, two to three weeks by some estimates. How hard and frustrating it was, all through early July, to watch the daisies struggle out there in the garden, wondering if they would ever bloom. Even the annuals in the planter boxes were having a tough time of it and are only now beginning to show signs of hitting their stride.
Still, plants seem to have this tenacious need to bloom. They are born to flower no matter what is happening around them.
With the tiniest of incentives—a little more sun and less rain, though hardly typical hot and sultry summer days the plants might have been expecting—the garden suddenly explodes in a riot of color. Before our astonished eyes, the peak flowering season compresses into just a few wildly intense weeks. Species that normally don’t bloom together like daisies, astilbes and oriental lilies burst into bloom at the same time. The garden becomes wall-to-wall color, shades and textures, a single glorious living carpet.
Life can be like that. Just when we think we have it all figured out, that we’re stuck in a rut, feel disconnected from everything and everyone around us, something happens to shock us back into life, what we were meant to be. Though there is still a damp chill to the air, out of the blue, in a burst of glorious energy we find ourselves blooming where we are planted with renewed excitement and joy.
True, the “getting there” may be stressful as all get out. Like those poor perennials, waiting for a summer that seems to never come, it can be tough just to stand upright or get out of bed in the morning. Out in our garden, we get up after weeding too long and sciatica kicks in with a vengeance, a painful wake-up call that the Spring of our lives is many a decade behind us.
And then a friend calls or a buddy passes along via email a great story or video clip off the Web. We forget the heating pad, worries about out 401Ks and the fluctuating price of gas and think about blooming, like our gardens, all those plants desperately flowering together before the season ends.
Rationally, we know that for everything there may be a season. But oh what fun it can be when life surprises us and that Gardener’s almanac proves less than accurate. In the garden, for all the work and planning and fertilizing and fretting, the wonder and awe remain—the outrageous and unexpected capacity, against all odds, to become what we are intended to be.