Resilience

A fair question Baby Sister asked: What’s with the PLANTS? Her emphasis, to be sure. The inquiry was rooted in my potting up 5 jade boxwood she ripped untimely from the womb of the earth—there a Macbeth reference, more specifically Macduff—and sent to me in a plastic garbage bag via our younger brother. 

They spent two days, bagged as it were, under a crape myrtle. The two on the right have been subsequently up-potted, the leaning mini-tower of boxwood is now in its final death throes. But, 4 of the 5 look to be candidates for bonsai—well, at least pre-bonsai. Nor would I choose the word topiary. Many folks here in South Carolina understand my reluctance to use that term: see Pearl Fryar in Bishopville. 

Let’s get an obvious gag set aside. If a boxwood limb falls in the hedge…?

So, the plant thing. 

I have said before plants make me laugh. Not fall on the floor, tears streaming laughs, but more wry chuckles, head-shaking guffaws, often those of the how did that happen variety.

My largest tomato plant this year is a volunteer I moved when about 6” tall. It promptly fell over but 3 days later rallied from forces within, and now a massive plant dominating a 4’x8’ bed. Makes me laugh. 

And the 2 rescue hydrangeas beneath that tomato jungle, they’ll survive, no doubt in my mind. 

Resilience.

Cut a Bradford pear to the ground, cut a Natchez crape to the ground, watch an oak tipped on its side by a hurricane, you’ll see. Watch perennial sunflowers come back from over-wintering—amazing, to me. Cue guffaws.

Just spend some time in the woods or walk along a rocky ledge or study beach dunes, you’ll see. Stuff wants to live. The biological imperative, I suppose.

Cracks in a sidewalk.

Not just flora, of course, but fauna, too. I’ll throw us into that second pile. From Savissivik to Tamdjert, from Warroad to Cocodrie, we survive—and we laugh.

Why? Maybe for a simple fact, we live.