when you begin to bloom

I.
There are plants that bloom so infrequently as to test the patience of all but the most determined admirers.  There is the night-blooming cereus, a species of cactus native to Mexico and Central America, whose elegant white flower has earned it the name "the Queen of the Night" in many different languages.  But this queen is enthroned just once a year, for no more than twelve hours, and before you have begun to appreciate the flower's melancholy beauty, it has begun to die; though, as it shudders and shutters, it somehow remains beautiful.

A plant's schedule of bloom is more or less set.  Of course, you can always kill a plant, and you can force it to bloom earlier than it would, but you really can't force it to behave other than its own nature dictates it should.  Sometimes a cherry blossom tree, usually a young one, gets confused, and you will see it waving a few silly pink sprigs in early September, but this is rare.  A lilac blooms just once, for about two weeks, every spring (with a few barbaric exceptions).  Rosa rugosa usually will have several flushes over the summer, but the common orange day lily, hemerocallis fulva, does not: it signs off with swollen seed-heads.  Daffodils will bloom in the very early spring, as winter ends - but you will never see a daffodil that decides, of its own volition, to bloom again for the Fourth of July.  There is a cycle, there is a process: they have their own natures.

And then there are those plants that ought to bloom, but don't.  Three or four summers ago, some of my mother's hydrangeas never bloomed, not all summer, neither a saturated blue nor washed-watercolor pink nor the shadowy violet in between.  The shrubs leafed out, then seemed to give up.  We puzzled over it; we asked horticulturist friends for advice.  Did we give them too much fertilizer, or to little water?  Too much love, or not enough?


II.
For many years, I myself did not flower.  I took up as little space as possible in my own life, and every season was as the one before it had been: bloom-less, stunted, unchanged.  There was no accounting for any of it: sometimes my branches were bare, even in the mildest summer; sometimes, I emerged from underground only to wither back below; sometimes, we thought I might bud, and maybe I even began to - but I never did bloom.  I spent so long without blooming that I forgot that I could, or ought to - I forgot that flowers have a purpose - though I could see the frustration of those who tended to me.  They would say: you could have the glory of the night-blooming cereus for all the hours of every day of the rest of your life - and yet you produce nothing, not even once a year.  If we give you water, will it help?  Fertilizer?  Or would you thrive on a bit of neglect?  More sun, or less?  I cannot blame those who began to think that perhaps this was my nature, that they had purchased from the nursery a mislabeled plant.


III.
Often times, your shovel will turn up objects - broken nails and horseshoes, crusty bricks, an old-fashioned glass milk jar, plant tags, oxidized pennies, golf balls, a spool of plastic thread, the dog's chew toy.  Some of these objects you will recognize as having been your own; some have worked their way up through layers of sediment over many decades.

In these past seven months, since I began to dig, I have found many things, but none of it has been junk, and none of it has, really, even been new: these are things that I had seen once before, but that I had not recognized as important then.  They are the things that my various tenders and gardeners - all the people who have bred me and grown me - dropped in the process.  And I find myself, again and again, on my knees in the soil, examining with fascination these things, holding them in my muddy hands, eagerly scraping away the dirt as from the most valuable of treasures.