A Small Diversion

Since March first, I have planted over a hundred flower seeds for the Temple garden. My bedroom, an improvised plant nursery where the grow lights are hung, is beginning to have the wonderful fragrance of damp soil and growing things.

The smell reminds me of being a young boy and getting to spend time with a friend of the family, ‘Uncle’ Eddy. His pants were always dirty (most adults I knew wore clean pants) and he chewed a burned out cigar all day. Uncle Eddy ran a greenhouse business and he let me come and ‘help’ one week each summer. Among many things, he taught me to use lukewarm water to water small plants. When I asked him why, he asked if I would rather be sprayed with ice-cold water or with warm water. When I said I preferred warm water, he just smiled at me.

But back to the seeds themselves. They came in a variety of unpromising shapes and sizes. Distinctly unflowerlike. The purple petunias, flamboyantly pictured on the flower package, were like round bits of tan tapioca. The Cherokee black eyed Susans were more like little bits of grit swept up off the floor—so small one sneeze would have dispersed the whole lot of them.

Now, most all of the carefully buried seeds have sprouted. The Queen Sophia marigolds are the most recent additions. The mature and bushy plants will prettily surround the spent iris in late June in the garden to the Buddha’s left. Many gardeners turn their noses at the common marigold, but I am quite fond of them. They bloom throughout the summer and don’t mind the heat and occasional dry spell.

The Queen Sophia variety, aside from having a wondrous name, has a handsome blend of deep orange and reds in its compact flower head. But the seeds themselves are like splinters of wood with a bristle of blond hairs protruding from one end. Weird, but big enough to individually place in six-packs this past Monday afternoon. Now, merely four days later, they are quarter inch green miracles—the babies of the nursery, but headed for great and bushy things.

The lacey leaved cosmos are the rulers of the nursery. They now soar a lordly six inches on green and red straight stems topped by deeply branched abundant leaves. They look like prehistoric trees over as the sit under the grow lights next to the bitty marigolds.

As I write this in the dark morning, outside it’s raining and just above freezing. It’s been a cold week and I worry about my timing. Part of the art of growing seeds indoors is knowing when to start so they’ll be ready when the weather gets warmer. Start too soon and the plants will turn ‘leggy’ and malnourished. But if you wait too long to start, the flower won’t mature and bloom on schedule and you won’t have the fun of spending March and April in a bedroom with green growing things.