GAILLARDIA IN BLOOM - Sundance Bicolor
The sowing of seed satisfies my deep need to participate in the quotidian mystery of life. As I scratch the surface of soil and scatter my few precious seeds I’m practicing the ancient art of propagating beauty in the canvas of soil. One moment seed. Days later, with the nurture of earth and sun and water, something green reaches for light from the dark recesses of the earth. Where else but the garden can one so easily witness an everyday miracle of God?
The snake in paradise is that I forget which seeds I’ve sown. The old adage — out of sight, out of mind — describes my gardening practice to a tee. Some tender green shoot springs up from the garden’s surface. And for the life of me or it, I can’t identify it. Weed or flower? No snap judgments will do, as life hangs in the balance.
The discernment process is never easy. I wait leaf by leaf for answers to be revealed. When will it unfurl its true leaves and colors to offer me a hint? Too often impatience causes me pull out what I judged as weed to learn later it was flower. My hasty hand has executed more poppies than I care to count and just last week, one of my new tender Gaillarida flowers pregnant with bloom. To an unfamiliar eye, flower foilage can look an awful lot like weed.
Gardening teaches me that answers are rarely black and white. Flower or weed. Good or evil. Even the good book teaches that God makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. One gardener’s flower can be another gardener’s weed. Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight.
an everyday life 
Sometimes, lack of discernment has its charms. In my book, if it blooms it’s a flower. The only thing that’s changed since childhood is that in those days I pronounced the word, “flowfer”. Milkweed, dandelion, thistle, clover – I love them all.
I’ll try to keep this short, but I think you’ll enjoy the story. A friend lives in Bellaire, a city within the city of Houston. Bellaire’s a tear-down/rebuild kind of place, full of huge houses and yuppies (or whatever they’re called now) and it’s about as socially and ecologically aware as any place in Texas.
Bellaire has folks roaming neighborhoods to make sure residents toe the line re: zoning, appearance, etc. They keep an especially sharp eye on the yards. Is it mowed? Tidy? Attractive? One day the garden police stopped at my friend’s door and demanded that she “do something about her yard”. It was a little thick and a little tall and more than a little tangled. Quite frankly, it was full of pretty, blooming weeds.
My friend gave the nice woman who was huffing on her front porch the eye, drew herself up as best she could and said, “I’ll have you know those are NOT weeds, they are wildflowers, and I am allowing them to go to seed.”
Since Bellaire is firmly on the side of wildflowers, even more than tidiness or uniformity, the garden policewoman was defeated. All she could do was say, “Well, when they’ve seeded themselves, tidy them up a bit.”
Which my friend did, in her own good time. We’ve laughed and laughed about it, while we make silly weed-and-wildflower bouquets.
sometimes i dream of living on a big patch of land where there are no neighbors to care if I have a field of lavendar for a front yard. other times i dream of living on a lake in southeast oklahoma. my husband says this neck of the woods is like the texas hill country before it became retirement central. i think these dreams will eventually take root — my postage stamp garden is rather confining. but my next house WILL BE smaller — forcing me to shed to travel lighter.