Column: Something About Nothing, by Julie Seedorf

After all the snow, after the day of heat, I took my trowel in hand and decided to plant my flowers.

This is the year I have vowed to make my yard cute, to increase my knowledge of flowers and to increase my knowledge of herbs. I hope my decision to increase my knowledge and put it into practice will actually help my flowers to live.

My mother was a master of knowing what to do with flowers and with her garden. Her yard wasn’t all cutesy but she loved flowers and planted them wherever she felt like it. She also knew how to make them grow inside and out. I do not have that skill.

Thanks to my Kindle and a site I follow on my Kindle called Garden Diva, I have picked up some tips and also some free books to read to open up my world of plants. We are working on eating healthier so I also wanted to grow some herbs.

Early one morning I planted my flowers that I bought from a local nursery. I felt, much like Sally, a character in my book, “Fuchsia, Minnesota,” who talks to the grass and doesn’t let weeds grow in her lawn. I talked to my flowers and encouraged them to grow deep roots and reach and grow their beauty to the sun. I also talked to the rabbits, that I love, in my yard and asked them to please bond with my plants, not as food but as spirit of the earth, that they can live side by side in beauty and peace.

I continued my journey to the farmer’s market on the first Wednesday they were open and visited some of my favorite vendors and bought herbs and honey. I added bread from another vendor that I know has a passion for health. That evening I sat on my porch and smelled the aroma of the herbs and saw the starting of growth of my flowers and I felt peace.

Along the way I bought some seeds to start some things from scratch in a planter so I could watch and nurture, and hopefully not kill, these seeds. I wanted to watch each little spurt and marvel at the wonder that one tiny seed could produce something magnificent.

As I watered my plants early one morning and watched the progress of my yard starting to come together, I also realized my yard has a long way to go to fix what has been neglected the past few years because of life circumstances.

I could see the weeds mingling with the healthy grasses. I could see the tree sprouts poking through the earth trying to create a forest in my yard. In the midst my hostas were living and growing side by side with the tree sprouts and the weeds. Just like life, nature intermingles with its storms and critters and pests.

Where would we be one without the other? Would we notice beauty, if we hadn’t seen the ugly? Would we notice sun, if we hadn’t seen the rain? Would we appreciate those tiny sprouts growing and reaching and giving us new life?

As humans every day we plant little seeds into other people’s lives that grow and result in us influencing each other’s lives.

I hope the seeds I have planted in my lifetime have been seeds of hope, seeds of love, seeds of growth with my ideas and seeds of creativity.

I know I have also planted many weeds in people lives. I can only hope the seeds I have planted outlive the weeds, and it is the seeds people remember, not the weeds.

“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.” — Leo Buscaglia

 

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send email to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net.