For Wilshire Baptist Church
“Myrtle is blooming,” I said early one morning after I opened the shutters in the dining room and looked out to see a few tufts of deep pink. We went out a few minutes later to walk to the park but first stopped by the little crepe myrtle near the street to confirm what I’d seen. Yes, it had bloomed!
LeAnn and I have been in our house 13 years, and we’ve put a lot of work into our flower beds and raised-bed vegetable garden. We’ve had a lot of success, but we’ve also logged a pretty good list of missteps, mistakes and good intentions that just haven’t worked out, or at least not at first and not as planned.
In the case of Myrtle, as we’ve named the little plant, that saga began when we first put in the yard. Our landscaper, perhaps in the rush to get the job done on time, planted a Japanese maple at each corner of the front porch. The maples didn’t live very long, mostly I believe because they were in the direct sun. The new live oaks planted at the same time on either side of the front yard were years away from providing the shade that Japanese maples crave.
We replaced the maples with matching “red dwarf crepe myrtles,” as they were labeled at the nursery. One bloomed pink, the other bloomed white, and neither were dwarfs, so we moved them and planted two more that lived up to their dwarf classification but barely bloomed and died. A third pair of replacements bloomed initially until the live oaks finally provided the kind of shade the long-gone maples would have loved but crepe myrtles don’t want or need. We grumbled about that for a couple of seasons until nature provided new opportunities.
First, the neighbor’s elm tree that shaded the crepe myrtle on the west from afternoon sun lost some significant branches during windstorms. That allowed the sun in, and that crepe myrtle has bloomed without stopping. Seeing the healing results brought by the sunshine, we dug up Myrtle on the east side and planted her on the parkway next to the base of a utility pole guy wire. Myrtle went into shock immediately and lost all her leaves, but when we checked the tips of the branches, we found they were still green, so we left her alone. Our patience paid off because new leaves began to sprout, the first little balls of buds began to show, and then – voila, color! Finally!
That’s been the story all around our yard. We planted cannas in the back corner around 10 years ago as part of our “fence of foliage.” The hope was they’d grow tall, spread horizontally over time and bloom spectacularly to add some color every summer. Up until this year, they achieved all those goals but one. They grew tall — taller than me, in fact — and spread sideways and even under the metal edging into the unpaved alley. Their giant copper leaves that turn green as the summer wears on reflect the sunlight in a beautiful way, but in all these years they’ve put out maybe two little blooms.
We have neighbors down the street whose cannas show big yellow blooms on every plant and have them in abundance all summer long. Last year we got one red bloom on one plant, but this year they’ve started blooming – more than ever before although not with big showy blooms as we hoped. From a distance, the cannas look like green giants with broad shoulders and silly little red heads. But they bloomed!
There’s a lot I’ve planted — literally and figuratively — that hasn’t lived up to expectations. Some of those plantings have produced no blooms at all, and if there have been blooms, they’ve been less than hoped for, promised on the instructions, or pictured in my imagination. But considering how rare blooms can be, and how tough life often is, I shouldn’t be so judgmental. I should be satisfied to step back, look and say, “But it bloomed!”