Plants and the joys of small dirt clumps

In the past few years I have finally come around to being able to grow plants. Most of my life when I picked up a plant at the store or wherever you could almost hear it scream out as if it had been plucked up by the worst horror movie monster ever. True, I was the Black Thumb, terror of all things plantlike.

Usually a plant would enter he house, linger for a bit, start to fall to pieces and finally, wither and die and only then would I notice and go "Oh yeah, I got a plant a while ago didn't I?".

Then it was the fun of trying to keep a plant alive sporadically when I noticed it. Water every alternating Thursday that ended in a 7 if I remembered, cutting off bad bits and finally trying to salvage sections by rooting them in water that would slowly evaporate to make their torment longer.

Last year a shift came somewhere, not exactly sure how or what changed the tide but I wanted plants in the house again. I got 2 or 3, did my best to tend them and keep them going and voila! One lived!

But it was an important one! Yes, the other two fell to the ravages of dry soil and a hungry cat, but one *lived*! It was amazing, I almost killed it and yet it sits on a high shelf right now with a bunch of greenery I never expected to see on it again. So it started off ... plants... for me again.

I have gone overboard I think, just a bit, maybe. But I have 4 successful house plants now that I trim for rootings to keep them in check, not to keep them alive and strangling. I discovered the fun on green onions, when you get one from the store and use the greens simply save a bulb and place in water by a window, the greens grow back! Plant magic! I have a porch that is filled with pots of this and that and the other. I have herbs and lavender and even some flowers this year. They are actually growing things. The feel of soil under fingertips is just such a connection to the earth even in a little way and to have it right there at any and every moment is amazing. To watch seeds sprout into actual plants and not into feeble things that fall over and die in a few days is the best type os magic I can imagine. Growth and sustenance and visual power for me.

I adore the look of the sunflowers as they are popping up, breaking themselves free of this shell, hard and safe it protects them until that moment they can shuck it off and reach for the sun.

Maybe this is just a version of me I am coming into. I am reaching for my sun. I am casting off the shell. Maybe it's just a cool thing to watch too. I can run with either idea.

One shoot on the lavender is becoming, turning from plant into flowering strand. Knowing this will be the first and that it's the one winning the race to grab the spotlight. I adore lavender and I am hoping this year to have enough of these flowering stalks to make myself a ribbon tied lavender wand again, they smell so sweet and capture the scent of summer in a bit of pretty for me. They may wind up to be too few or too small as they were last year, but then again, it just means watching another year go by and having them thrive for longer. It works.

So I will watch and wait, the african daisies erupted, I might have to make choices and thin them out a little. I hope not, I would love a splash of color wrapped around each other as they grow. I do know sometimes the choices have to happen though, you have to thin out to let some thrive sometimes.


So that is my little bit of magic in life that crept up over me through the past few years. No smashing blaze of enlightenment happened, it was a snails journey, slow and unnoticed until it happened and the switch from the Black Thumb of Plant Horror has become a container gardener, might not be the greenest thumb around but it's the one I got.