It’s the time of year when my rose plants are pumped with growth hormones. They’re shooting out new leaves, and every stem has buds ready to pop open.
Search for “rose” and you get images showing this time of year, with fresh glossy foliage and newly opened flowers:
The new buds look like teenagers to me, full of energy and growth. As with humans, what’s new and tender is vulnerable: many of my rose buds are covered in aphids sucking nourishment from them.
This is also a rose plant, one that I transplanted from a bad location. It think it’ll survive, but I’m not expecting flowers this year.
Spring is an exciting time in the garden, when so many things reach their pinnacle. But the brightness and tenderness of the flowers feels almost over the top to me, because so much of the year is not this. Most of the year, plants are focusing on photosynthesizing, fruiting, and storing energy rather than putting everything toward new growth. As a gardener, most of what I see is not the peak.
These were my tulips in April:
And these are the same plants in May:
The flowers are gone, and the leaves have done their job. The plant is doing a different job now, invisibly growing new offshoots underground that can grow into new tulips.
This was my apple tree blossoming in April:
Now what’s left is these brown shrively bits that I love to see because it means the tree has set fruit.
And in September the tree will look like this, with cedar apple rust marring the leaves, and branches weighed down with the apples that my kids like to pick after school:
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At my (women’s) college, it was traditional to skinny-dip in a particular fountain. The first time my classmates and I took the plunge there, I remember being surprised that naked women looked so different from each other and from pictures I’d seen. Even at 18, we did not look like the human body templates I was used to using for costume design in theater.
Every week I take the kids to swim lessons. We’re changing in the locker rooms at the same time as the water exercise class, which is mostly old ladies. I like that my daughters are getting some sense of what different bodies look like at 70 and 80.
These women do not look like swimsuit models. They look like people who just had a nice swim and are chatting with their friends. When I’m 70, I hope I’m doing something like that on a Wednesday evening.
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When bodies are young and tender, or tight and strong, is not the only time they’re good.
It’s natural to love what’s fresh and vivid. But being a gardener means following a lot of different stages with interest. I love the plants for what they are, and what they were, and what they will be.