Coupeville, Oak Harbor and South Whidbey garden clubs are all involved in their spring plant sales, either counting the money from ones already held or getting ready for the flock of flower-lovers yet to come.
While I’ve taken many plant sale promo pictures over the years, I’ve never actually been to one. It would be too shameful to take up the space that could be occupied by someone who cares. It reminds me of the time I went to see and opera call La Boheme and felt like a monkey at a French soiree. What were these people saying, and what was I doing there? When intermission finally arrived after the interminable carryings on on-stage, I wanted a banana, but all they had was wine and cappuccino.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy a pretty flower now and then, it’s just that by possessing one, I’m dooming it to an unkind fate, planted in Whidbey Island’s crummiest soil in its shadiest spot. To find a steady supply of sunlight, you have to climb 100-feet up one of the Douglas-fir trees in the neighborhood, but then you come under ferocious crow attack, which many sun-seekers never survive. We find their bodies on the ground, eyeballs plucked out by those nasty crows.
There is however one plant salesperson who knows our family secret, so we go to her each year. She recommends plants that any ape should be able to grow, and reminds us to buy a bag of quality dirt and a jar of fertilizer to go with it. We’ve given up trying to grow plants in the ground, instead opting to imprison them in pots. The pots are large, hold a goodly amount of quality soil poured from a plastic bag, and it’s easy to shake fertilizer all around.
This year we chose a few shade-hardy begonias, one sturdy-looking fuchsia, and a few other plants with Latin names. I don’t feel so bad when the Latins expire because it’s a dead language anyway. But I had high hopes for the begonias and fuchsia.
Rather than go right home and plant the flowers, we though we’d wait from better weather. So we left them outside, all boxed together on my plastic lawn chair. When they needed watering, we simply pulled their chair out from under the eave into the rain. This went on for a week as we waited for planting weather. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a copy of the Bad Farmers’ Almanac available.
Finally, the weather showed some improvement late Sunday morning. We went into gardening mode, throwing out the dead plants and weeds from last year and pouring in new soil. There was extensive discussion about what flower to plant in which pot, and then a long telephone call, by which time it had started to rain. So we quickly dug holes, yanked plants from their containers, stuck them in the holes, surrounded them with fresh dirt, and sprinkled them with fertilizer. We went inside, hoping that this year’s crop might last a few, colorful months before beginning to show the inevitable signs of neglect and impending death.
Sunday night, of course, bought more rain and a wind storm that knocked a tree across our road. In the darkness of early Monday morning I could see that our flowers had lost a few blossoms, but at least they were still upright. The one white begonia stood high and proud as the flag at Fort McHenry, and I saluted it out of respect and admiration.
By 7:00 Monday morning sunlight was breaking through the clouds. In only a few hours, several errant rays were bound to slip through the tree branches and warm our newly-planted flowers. There was hope that this year our flowers would live for a while. Of course, that was before another storm hit Monday night.
Good luck, flowers, you’re going to need it.
