They no longer bloom,
but the snapdragons bring
an extravagance of dark green
to the garden otherwise bare.
I almost missed this pleasure,
poised as I was to rip them
from the soil when frost took
all the flowers. But there
is something past bloom
in me that thrills now
to see them there, growing
for the sake of growing,
tall and fully leafed out. Grow
while you can, they seem to say.
Until it’s all over, don’t you
ever stop with your growing.
Posts Tagged ‘garden’
Snapdragons in Autumn
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, bloom, garden, snapdragon on November 3, 2025| 4 Comments »
Eyesight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bees, flowers, garden, grief, mother, sight, vision on October 21, 2025| 9 Comments »
I’ve never seen the world the bee sees,
a world of iridescence in which petals
change color depending on the angle,
a world in which a field of sunflowers appear
not as a smear of yellow but as individual
blooms. I’ve never seen the bullseye
pattern in the primrose or the pansy,
these human eyes unable to perceive
designs in UV light. Today I look out
at the empty garden where just last week
there were marigolds and calendula,
and I see the absence of flowers, but also,
I see mounds of golds, yellows, oranges, and
I see the boy who used to sit on the edge
of the wooden beds and I see the young
version of me, not yet gray, weeding
the rows, while the boy tells me stories
about school and the things he longs
for beyond what he has. They’re there,
I know, the flowers, the woman,
the boy, though somehow they’re so far
beyond the spectrum not even
the bees can see them.
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
Right Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, meditation, quietude on September 25, 2025| 7 Comments »
These autumn afternoons
I find myself in the garden
standing amongst the flowers.
Not deadheading. Not weeding.
Not harvesting. Not scanning
for aphids. Just standing there
a few moments, hands hanging
empty at my sides. It lasts only
a minute or two before I return
to work with a clarity, an attunement,
that felt impossible before.
I want to plant an inner garden.
One I visit without a step.
One that asks nothing of me
except that I find myself there.
A Scrap in Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dahlia, flower, garden, time on September 6, 2025| 5 Comments »
Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
Case Study in Insanity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, growing, insanity, persistance, planting, trying, zinnias on August 30, 2025| 4 Comments »
Every year, the zinnias have died,
or else have come so close to dying
I’ve dug out their bare, stunted stems
and frost-browned leaves and planted
trusty petunias. But this year. This year
an enchantment of zinnias. A profusion
of red. Magenta. Yellow. Orange. White.
An astonishment of beauty. A bright
constellation of earthbound joy.
You have heard this, too: insanity
is doing the same thing again expecting
different results. So let me be insane.
For this is the year when again
I bought zinnia starts and hoped
for abundance and was stunned
by flamboyant abundance. It’s making
me wonder what else I might sow
until I no longer have energy to plant:
Kindness. Forgiveness. Trust. Love.
Just because they haven’t always flourished
before, well, look at all these zinnias
outside my door, brilliant and burgeoning,
dozens and dozens, and sure, they will die
come winter, but for now, more flowers arrive
every day. Brilliant. Just look at all those petals.
So Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, grief, holy, loss on August 15, 2025| 22 Comments »
Finn, the larkspur are nearly done blooming now,
the tall stalks are scruffy with seed pods where
the dark blue petals used to be.
Is it strange to give you the garden report?
Today is four years since you chose to leave
this world of bindweed and deep red dahlia,
this world of millipedes and green beans
dangling on their vines. The sky is thick
with smoke from a wildfire not so far away.
It was a relief when it began to rain
while I was picking snapdragons and
sunflowers, zinnias and lavender.
I didn’t mind getting drenched
while I filled five vases with flowers,
four vases for our home and one
your father and I took to your grave.
I felt so alive in the middle of the storm,
arranging the blooms in vases just so
while the water dripped from my hair, my nose.
Felt so alive as I smelled the air and spoke
to you and the flowers and sky.
Today my friend Wini told me one way
to keep life sacred is to ask the holy to come.
Please, I said as I stood in the rows.
Please, come. Is it possible the asking itself
is the bridge from the everyday to the holy?
Because I felt it. There in the rain
with my grief-bent heart. There beside
the calendula, aphids and all. Hair plastered
to my head. Tears on my face. Memory
of you writing I love you in the carrot bed.
Me making bouquets for a difficult day.
Even when it hurts, the holy.
Some of the Stories
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, love, self-compassion, self-loathing, self-love on August 4, 2025| 11 Comments »
It all serves.
—Joi Sharp
Strange, perhaps, this path
to learn to love myself—
throwing back Mad Dog 20/20
in a raucous backyard party.
Letting college boys touch me
just to feel wanted for a night.
The journals I kept to calculate
how many calories in a bowl of All Bran
a banana muffin, a cucumber, a plum.
I don’t know why I had to date
that man who took what I
did not want to give. Why
I became quiet, quieter still.
I don’t know why I told that lie.
Don’t know why I couldn’t contain
my anger that one morning. Don’t know
why I said yes when I meant no.
But I do know I am the sum
of all these stories, and maybe
I had to go through self-loathing
before I could practice self-love.
I know all those choices brought me here
to this garden in late summer
where, despite a lack of rain,
the nasturtiums are thriving
like tiny orange teachers in how to be soft.
There is a love so much greater than I am
that guides me to wrap the arms of my heart
around all the younger versions of myself
as if they are my children, helping me trust
there is nothing they could do
that would make them unlovable,
even when their actions caused pain.
Look, I say to my past, to myself. The roses
I thought were dead are blooming.
Things grow in the most surprising ways.
Soon, there will be sunflowers.
After a Day in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, green, growing on August 1, 2025| 4 Comments »
If we are made of light,
we are also made of dark.
Like the marigolds I transplanted
today. Their leaves reach toward sun
at the same time all those thin,
thin roots reach down, down
into the earth.
Green, I say to myself.
Green is who I am. Green
is what happens when
light meets dark. Green
is daring to live in two
opposite worlds at once,
it’s knowing full body
how deeply those two worlds
need each other.
I say it not as a fact,
but as a way to wake myself up.
Green. It tastes clean in my mouth.
Like something beautiful.
Someone about to bloom.
Growing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, garden, summer, tending on July 25, 2025| 3 Comments »
for James & Brad
In late July, if you’re lucky, you wander
through the flower gardens your friends
have been nurturing for years—red beds
of bee balm and yellow mounds of St. John’s Wort,
long purple spears of butterfly bush
and thick golden stands of rudbeckia,
and all around you the buzzing, the humming,
the pollinators thrumming, the weaving
of bees and the braiding of birds
and somehow, standing in this thriving place
so lovingly tended and mindfully grown,
you are flooded with admiration for your friends
so great you disappear into the fullness
and emerge with new roots of your own,
one more living thing shaped by the care
and kindness they bring to the world.