3 Min read

On marigolds

On love

1 Book rec

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It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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A curious thing happened last week.

The three back porch planters arrived somewhat spontaneously on my part and more intentionally on my mother’s part after we moved into the house. Let’s call it a decade ago. My mother has an obsession with plants and flowers. For me, each spring the annuals go in and that’s it. The porch is abloom in dahlias, celosia, bells, daisies, or whatever the pick of the year.

The neighbors’ kids raised money on teams by selling plants. They delivered them in spring, hardy and ready to bloom. Good on ’em — money for teams and annuals for planters. No shopping! After years of varieties, marigolds grew best. I love the sunny circles and minimal maintenance.

The children taught me well. They have left the lane and now I buy my own annuals.

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The marigolds don’t require it, but I deadhead the plants. In late summer, I collected the dried flowers and threw them in the trash. Then I began to throw them into the old rose bed.

Roses are high-maintenance so there are no more roses. What can I tell you? I’m nostalgic, so I still call it the rose bed. Another of my mother’s obsessions in early years.

One morning while taking the dogs out, I noticed what looked like green sprouts in the rose garden. Weeds like the beds too, by the way. So I hadn’t given it much thought until a couple weeks ago when I saw a bright patch of yellow.

Closer look. Huh. A marigold?

I leaned over the railing and noticed a half dozen plants bursting forth, bigger by two or three times than the planter flowers! I’m a regular Johnny Appleseed.

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I’m back from Oklahoma where I saw my son settled into his new digs. He took me line dancing and invited me onto the floor to two-step. The next day, he invited his father and me for dinner and made chicken tikka masala with naan and Jasmine rice. Chicken was tender from seasoning and cooking in the air fryer. My son wasn’t exactly a chef at home, prone to all-day cereal and pizza from the box if I was traveling. Now, he cooks on weekdays and his roommate does the dishes.

When I returned, the rose bed had bloomed into a brilliant sea of gold. I may have to change the name, but marigold bed doesn’t have the same ring to it. I can’t stop thinking of my son settled into his own place and the size and color of the marigolds after they left the planters.

Marigolds grow in full sunlight. At a certain age, you have to leave home to grow in full sunlight.

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My friend and I found a book in a Little Free Library and she mailed me a copy of The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, because she wanted us to each have the book. The wood engravings illustrate the short story well.

What’s memorable is the ripple effect of a small task, such as planting a single acorn, 100 times each day, every day. What is more memorable is the story behind the story.

In 1953, American editors asked the French writer to tell a story about an unforgettable character. They hadn’t realized that Giono would write his own unforgettable character, Elzeard Bouffier. While rejected because it was not an actual person, the story would later be published with Vogue and go in print around the world in many languages.

It’s a green kind of book and has inspired restoration efforts, but it’s a lovely and heartbreaking story about finding happiness as well. Bouffier loses his son and then his wife and lives through wars. The story was also titled, The Man Who Planted Trees and Grew Happiness.

In closing, I leave you with this passage.

After the midday meal he [Elzeard Bouffier] resumed his planting. I suppose I must have been fairly insistent in my questioning, for he answered me. For three years he had been planting trees in this wilderness. He had planted one hundred thousand. Of the hundred thousand, twenty thousand had sprouted. Of the twenty thousand he still expected to lose about half. To rodents or to unpredictable designs of Providence. There remained ten thousand oak trees to grow where nothing had grown before.

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

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FOOTNOTE

* TOOLBOX: Here is the opening page of text–two paragraphs–in case the photo text is not readable. My friend wrote that the opening paragraphs pulled her in.

For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the good fortune to be able to observe its performance over many years. If this performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity, if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and that, in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no mistake.

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About forty years ago I was taking a long trip on foot over mountain heights quite unknown to tourists, in that ancient region where the Alps thrust down into Provence. All this, at the time I embarked upon my long walk through these deserted regions, was barren and colorless land. Nothing grew there but wild lavender.

Opening of Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees.

Giono’s many years seem necessary to this observer, to recognize exceptional qualities. To shed egoism, to practice generosity, to do and be and give without compensation may describe the life of a hermit and to a great extent Bouffier is just that. He loses his only loves in life, his son and wife. He goes on, one acorn at a time. And there is healing in one small good deed done without it ever reaching another soul, save the narrator who happens upon him.