When I saw the first creamy orange day lilies blooming, I was cross. “This is happening way too much!” I bought a yellow day lily just like my other yellow day lilies, with a picture clearly showing a likeness to my yellow day lilies!
Doggone it. I pick up a plant that says “red bee balm,” to add to my patch of red bee balm, and it flowers in fuchsia, or lavender. Plants that were labeled “tall” come out short. Plants that are supposed to spread out into ground cover just sit there in the spot where they were planted.
The so-called “red” spyrea I planted came out decidedly pink, and the “red” azalea is pink. The “bright blue” phlox are more of a pale lilac. Now I have orange day lilies blooming like crazy in the yellow day lily patch. For Pete’s sake!
Will someone please tell these plant growers to get their labels right?
Wait a minute. Does it matter that what a plant has grown to be is not what I expected of it? Is it such a terrible thing that the label was wrong, if the plant becomes what it is meant to be? What’s the complaint, if the plant is thriving? The plant is going to do what it is designed to do, whether it was labeled correctly or not.
How like our children: the ones who discover that they are different from the gender label assigned to them at birth, the ones who discover they belong to a different category called non-binary, the ones whose bodies tell them they are something other than heterosexual, the ones whose natural talents and interests are different from the family’s list of desirable occupations.
When my plants grow to be different from what the label said to expect, there is nothing I can do to change that. I am the one who needs to make an adjustment. I can care for it where it is, the way it is. Or I can work with those unexpected colors – learn how to help them thrive in some other place where they seem to belong.
I confess that sometimes I have behaved badly, not like a gardener at all. I dug up the non-conformists, tossed them into the wheelbarrow, heaved them onto the pile of garden debris. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Too many of our children are treated like that by their families, and end up on the streets – unwanted, discarded. Hungry and homeless. I pray that they find their roots. Some things dug up and thrown on the heap in my back yard show up right there the next year – rooted and blooming in the discard patch. Thriving. I pray that can be the fate for children cast out of their families.
I am older now, less into digging up. I’m learning to let things be. Because a few creamy orange day lilies interspersed with the yellow ones is a good reminder that each living thing has its own life to live, just as I have mine.
