When Plans on Paper Begin to Materialize in the Garden

Do you love blooming things? I love flowers and fruit and all the work of blooming things in the garden. Blooming things say to me there’s a harvest coming. The beauty of flowers brings delight to my heart, whether it’s giving, arranging at home, or seeing them outside our cottage

When we moved to the Ozarks of Oklahoma, it became a new growing zone for me, with new weather patterns, and certainly new awareness that I wasn’t in a humid, hot, climate in the fall and winter. I appreciate the four-season weather in our area and I am ever learning what I took for granted could grow here but cannot grow here because we have a different growing zone.

Pamela Crawford, the container gardening expert and author, turned me on to container gardening over a decade ago. I met her through her books at the Huntsville Botanical Garden and co-writer Harvey Cotten. Sometimes a Sunday in the garden turns into so much more. Their book made doing the beautiful container gardens doable. Later, another book of Pamela’s featured how to grow beautiful container gardens that produced food and I was mesmerized. As a beginner gardener, even I got great results. Pamela’s personal story is very encouraging, I’ve gotten to know her a bit personally, and I am always encouraged that her success was built on things that failed and the knowledge used to succeed differently.

This week I was able to purchase some end-of-season plants for the new front cottage garden. Azaleas, which grow here, were down to $4 from $28.88, a few miniature cabbages rose bushes, two Mandevilla that will bloom in white.

A few plants for Anaheim peppers, a lemon cucumber I’ve never grown, and one more hydrangea. (I’ll take as many as I’m blessed with) I had budgeted $150 after saving several small extra jobs, to add a few more bushes and perennials to the cottage space. I was delighted to come home with what I saw as well as bags of bark and soil. We typically like to buy from local growers, but the price was hard to turn down, so I’ll take the remaining part of the budget and go to our favorite locals and encourage local businesses too.

The already blooming flowers of some of our new purchases, plus the new white hydrangea blooms, are hopeful. A few blooms will be cut, but others will be allowed to go to see to propagate more blooms next year. Our growing season is long, so it may be some will begin growing this year.

Have you noticed how seeds of ideas bloom into action when hope is applied? Just this weekend I had a firm idea of how I wanted the gate which doesn’t even exist yet, to look like, what plants would adorn it, and within a few days, not only did we begin to look for them, we found them. Last night I found the penciled hopes when we didn’t even have walls.

. I believe in planning for that reason. Wishful thinking has a base belief that “it won’t, or can’t happen” and dreaming and imagining lays the groundwork for “what would I like to happen?” and later, “what is required for the next step to happen?”

Today Redbird Cottage is blooming hope, there were squash blooms in the above-ground garden, blooms from seemingly dead plants I brought home a year ago, and this morning blooms on two of the new plants found last night….and they look a good bit like the imagined ones in my last summer’s planner.

Hope deferred makes the heart grow weary, for me, in seasons that feel as though it’s going to take forever to finish, I try to remember that most experiences need to be imagined as you’d like first to build the roadmap of how to get there. There is joy in all of it, if one takes time to dream, to look for inspiration, to learn and to expand more deeply in what you are desiring to do. As we seek to learn, others often pour into us what they have learned. What an encouragement, to learn from others who know.