The wonder of nature can be seen in the red maple shapes of this yellow nasturtium. Courtesy photo/Rachel Lovejoy
Nature speaks in shapes, textures and colors, and her messages are based on how all those are organized on the world’s great canvas. How often have I come upon a favorite pattern or particular brush stroke that I see repeated in totally new and unexpected places? It happened again recently when I was taking photos of flowers, one of my favorite things to do.
Now, as I’ve probably mentioned, I am not the most organized and orderly gardener. I dabble, and by that I mean that I try something, and if it doesn’t work, I try something else. In the spring, I start seeds (some I’ve harvested myself and others I’ve bought) in pots. Unlike many gardeners, moon phases and last frost dates never enter into my thinking. Once April rolls around, if I see other things popping up and blossoming in the ground, then it’s safe to put the pots out. And if a frost does happen to claim anything, well, I just start over. Experience has shown me that, the more I fuss over plants, the worse they perform. So now, I plant ‘em and forget ‘em, to the point that, when I spot something new out there, I can’t remember if and when I planted it. But to me, that just adds to the childlike joy of finding a “new” flower!
But back to the pots. By June, the plants have generally outgrown them for I tend to plant seeds thickly. It’s the Law of Likelihood, as I call it. The more seeds, the “likelier” more will germinate and grow. Hasn’t failed me yet. But it makes for extra work once the plants become pot-bound, not the least of which is that they must be watered every few hours, especially during a drought.
At that point, I look for bare or ugly spots in the garden itself, or what passes for a garden here. I remove a bit of soil from those spots, un-pot the plants, and set them down in the holes. And that’s where they pass the remainder of the growing season. This year, I did that with marigolds, sunflowers, cosmos, and nasturtiums, and left them to insinuate themselves into the tiny landscape. The result of this eclectic and sloppy horticultural practice is never the same twice, and it’s a lot of fun to see formerly trapped plants spread their wings (or leaves) and fly. A few hits of plant food and they’re off, dwarfing everything around them, including the spearmint that keeps trying to take over but hasn’t quite succeeded yet because I keep moving new arrivals into their neighborhood.
When I’m transferring plants from pot to garden, I’ve also been known to toss scraps of half-faded plants, pieces of roots and stems and faded leaves into the mix. So it’s not unusual to go out one day and spot a flower growing where there was none before, or at least none that I remember putting there. That happened this year with some nasturtiums, which leads me to the original thought from which I veered several paragraphs back. As so often happens, I snapped a few photos of the yellow blossoms then came inside to upload them to my computer. And there it was, on the screen, not “just” a yellow nasturtium flower, but one with a unique story to tell.
In its incomparably creative way, nature had taken the time to paint tiny maple leaves at the bases of the flower’s five yellow petals. And to add to the interest, the leaves were the same shade of red that many species of maple leaves turn in the fall.
Did the forces that produce these wonders decide that the maple leaf shape would be a good one to insert into that flower? Has this happened before and I just didn’t notice or I was too busy looking at the garden that I didn’t really see the flowers? It happens, and it’s one of the reasons formal gardening focuses so heavily on the visual effect created by numerous plants grouped in a certain way. Did nature decide to incorporate a favorite motif into another of its creations, and in the process making it into yet another masterpiece?
Whatever the answer, it just seems all too random. I think nature was trying to tell me something. I love autumn. It’s my favorite season, due in no small part to the fireworks display the trees put on in October. What are the chances that some of that color that I love so much would also show up in one of my favorite flowers and in the same shape as on the trees? Maybe nature tucked those tiny “leaves” into that nasturtium, too, to remind me that the energy that runs through me also courses through every thing that lives and grows, and that it is all, maple leaf and nasturtium flower alike, part of one eternal continuum. It’s why a chipping sparrow’s feathers look an awful lot like the stripes in a chipmunk’s fur or the veins that carry water and nutrients through the trunk of a tree work the same way as the vessels that carry blood through my body.
One thing is certain: I will never look at red maple leaves in the same way again. For I’ll always remember how they showed up one day tucked inside one innocuous little flower, in quiet testimony to the boundless collection of interacting forces that we simply call life.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
