Hope Lost and Found

Hemerocallis 'Blue Racer'

Life, as gardening, is a constant struggle, a process of waning and waxing hopes, heart-breaking failures and all-too-infrequent successes in a never-ending circle.  Without warning, we occasionally slam headfirst into low points, spiritual nadirs that test the strengths of our soul.  A pandemic disrupts our daily routines, throwing the world into chaos with our very lives perhaps dependent on the potential danger of a trip for groceries.  A senseless killing rips apart the fabric of a nation, leaving looted cities and downed monuments in its wake.  In my own world, yesterday, a cousin, a grown man struggling and in turmoil, committed suicide on an impulse, leaving his family devastated and lost.  Hope, at such times, seems a distant mirage, far off and never closer.

Hemerocallis 'Beautiful Edgings'

Gardening mirrors life in its roller-coaster of summits and valleys.   We fight daily against drought and heat and ice and flood, relentlessly watching for enemies, ceaselessly searching for beauty.  ProfessorRoush has been wanting for rain from cloudless skies for weeks, carrying water to quench the thirst of the weakest, ripping weedy competition from the ground, watching for leaves wilting and rolling.  Hope leaks away as the buffalograss browns.

Hemerocallis 'Space Coast Color Scheme' 

In gardening and in life, we must hold faith that the storms pass and calm mornings, like this one, will come.  A heavy rain filled the emptiness of the night during my sleepless tossings, and I rose to find the ground full and soft, and this year's first 'Beautiful Edgings' covered in jewels.  New daylilies, 'Space Coast Color Scheme' (Kinnebrew, 2008) and 'Blue Racer' (Stamile-Pierce, 2011), also greeted Bella and I on our rounds of the rain gauges, rejoicing with us at the modest 1.5 inches of heaven-gifted moisture and the cooler air.

Euonymus Scale

Three peaks and a valley this morning, the latter the finding of my 'Emerald Gaiety' euonymus suddenly covered in Euonymus Scale (Unaspis euonymi) and near death.  Twenty years of euonymus without scale ended in an instant, joy replaced by worry again to begin another cycle.

'Hope for Humanity'

This year, amidst despair, I cling to the thought and the survival of 'Hope for Humanity', the wishfully named Parkland series shrub rose with a prominent position in my backyard.  She has outdone herself this season, blooming with blood-red abandon, responding to my attentions and my efforts to give her more space and sunlight this spring.  I cling to the hope that, if we care for each other and for our world as I ministered to this rose, we can all keep a little 'Hope for Humanity'.  Just a little bright hope to grow with sunlight and push through hard times.  Shaun, I know you liked roses, I wish you'd known hope better, and I pray you find peace.

'Hope for Humanity' (the purple faded rose below and to the right is a nearby 'Dr. Hugo')

The Quarantine Is Real

Friends, ProfessorRoush wouldn't be blogging again quite so soon, but he noticed an interesting little fact after he finished Saturday's blog.  While checking the statistics for Garden Musings, I was astonished to see that blog traffic from Italy had risen to 2nd place over the past week, behind only the United States.  You can see that depicted in graphic splendor on the map on the right, the prominent medium-green boot under Europe.  Welcome, my Italian gardening amici and amiche!

Since this blog started, a decade ago, Italy is in 7th place all time in blog visitors, behind the United States (always #1!), Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Canada, and France.  I would like to believe that the massive increase in interest from Italy has occurred because I've recently written some stellar Tuscany-relative plant potboilers.  However, the hard truth is that I am forced to conclude that there are at least a few incredibly-bored gardeners in Italy who have quarantined themselves and, having exhausted Netflix and AmazonPrime, decided the next best time-occupier is to read the blog of some gardening weirdo in forgotten Kansas.

Yes, I know 174 visitors from Italy may not push me across the edge to stardom as the next great garden prophet, but from another perspective, compared to the numbers from the U.S., Italy normally is about 3.5% of the U.S. total.  This past week those numbers are 50% of the U.S. total!  It has to be coronavirus quarantine-driven, doesn't it?  Please though, don't ask me to speculate why the numbers from Turkmenistan are up.  I can't even find the latter on a map.

My beleaguered Italian friends, I hope you stay well and can get back into your own gardens soon, whether that garden is the small balcony planter that I imagine hanging over your ancient cobblestone streets, or it is an entire square mile planted with lavender, laurel, and rosemary surrounding a country villa.  If it helps you pass time reading of roses and forsythia in Kansas, if you are amused by pitched battles against Japanese Beetles, rose rosette disease, and sun-scorched drought, then please keep reading away.  In the end, if my small script in life was to help you keep off the plague-ridden streets, then I'm content that I've served in this smallest of ways.