Assisting the Miraculous

The morning glories have already twirled up the lead strings I set for them and gained the top of the pergola. I planted them from seed in late May. It doesn’t do to plant them too early. They don’t like to be transplanted from indoors and they need the warmer weather. Temperatures much below fifty degrees disturb their growth and an unexpected frost would certainly kill them.

I look back in the gardening diary I kept this spring. I can never remember exactly when is best to begin the different seeds. So I thought this year, I would write everything down. But looking back, I can’t find any entry for the morning glories. I know I soaked them overnight before I planted them. And I know it was a Saturday or Sunday, because Melissa helped me. But as to which day it actually was, I can’t recall.

It’s funny how clear things are in the moment but their exact order in the flood of other things is vague. Something happens and I am often so grateful, these days, for the particularness of it. I vividly remember opening the seed packet and pouring out those familiar dark and chunky seeds. I’ve grown morning glories every spring for ten years now. They seemed to be the perfect plants for the pergola we built on the handicap access ramp. I tried it the first year and it worked, so it’s been one of my spring rituals to plant these seeds.

After soaking twenty-four hours in water, the protective black husks of the morning glory seeds loosen and the beige meat beneath begins to show—sometimes even splitting to reveal the shoot that will eventually rise upward—reflexively and brilliantly circling whatever it touches for support.

Preparing the soil for the planter is the main work in the planting of morning glories. Melissa and I go down to the compost pile and the leaf mulch pile. We shovel some of the broken down matter onto a screen and sift it through to remove the roots and rocks and debris, leaving only a fine mixture of the two in the wheel barrow beneath. We add some soil from another part of the garden, then a small amount of commercial growing mix, then wheel the barrow back to the garage to fill the oblong planters that I hang beneath the pergola each year.

That’s the hard work. Then we fit the planters into their sustaining brackets and poke shallow finger holes in the soft soil. Two holes at the base of each string with five strings (already strung from the planters edge to the top of the pergola) per rectangular planter. Each string only needs one plant to fill it lushly, but we plant two just in case. Most of the seeds will sprout, but since morning glories don’t like to be transplanted, it’s better to have a little insurance.

The wet seeds wet our fingers and the loose soil clings to our skin as we carefully place one small growing seed in each dark home and cover it over. We then plant sweet alyssum seedlings (also grown from seed but started indoors exactly on April 16^th) in the front of the planters. These prolific plants will be covered by small white blossoms and will look pretty as well as shade the roots of the morning glories to preserve the moisture the summer tangle of leaves will need.

Each seed that we plant with our dirty wet fingers will grow (if it sprouts) into a climbing vine perhaps twenty feet long with more heart shaped leaves than one could reasonably count. These dark seeds are the catalyst that transforms water, soil and sun into this particular miracle of intelligence and engineering. And each seed was harvested from the seed of a morning glory last year which was harvested from a morning glory the year before and so on back to the shrouded beginnings of morning glories and plants—even, if you go far enough back, to the mysterious beginnings of the earth and the cosmos. Each seed arising from the primordial chaos.

If we’re lucky, the blossoms will come in mid-to-late summer. Sometimes they arrive earlier and sometimes they wait until just four or five weeks before the cold weather that will kill them. I still haven’t understood the all variables.

But now, the morning glory vines have climbed their assigned strings and reached the top of the pergola. The alyssum plants are in full (and fragrant) bloom at their base. I’ll water them each morning and wait semi-patiently for the vines and foliage to thicken. The soft azure blossoms that I see so clearly in my mind’s eye, will appear on their own schedule. I’m happy to play a supporting role in the ongoing drama.

Personal Practice – Take a moment and look around you. Notice how everything you see has a story behind it—where it came from, when it arrived, who was involved. Pick one object that catches your attention and remember its story. See how far back you can trace its arising. What you don’t know, let yourself imagine. Then take a moment to thank this particular thing and all the people that allowed it to come into being.