On Expectations

I’m not a gardener, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about most of the flowers in my small backyard flower garden. I know that this one is an iris, and that it’s yellow. My mom is a die-hard gardener, she can walk you through her gardens and tell you exactly what each plant is, how big it gets, how often to split it, when it blooms and for how long it blooms. She’s the reason I have flowers in my backyard flower garden – every once in a while some of hers get unruly and she has to split them, then I reap the benefits.

I know what this one is, sort of. It’s a daylily, and it beat the odds. From what I hear it’s not a very common color – this one is still a week or two away from blooming (I think? Did that sound convincing? I just took a stab in the dark!) This is a traveling daylily – I purchased it when Nicholas’ pre-school in Indiana held a garden fundraiser. I let him pick a perennial from the catalog and told him that we’d plant it out in front of our house, then years from now we could talk about how we planted it when he was 5 years old and marvel at how big it had gotten. I had lofty dreams, really, that I could even keep the thing alive.

Luckily we decided to move back to Wisconsin before I ever got it into the ground, and it had a harrowing couple of weeks sitting in a plastic pot on our back deck. Truthfully it was not looking so hot by the time I got it up to Wisconsin and placed it in my mother’s capable hands. The plan was that she’d give it a temporary home in her garden until I had a place to put it but that took longer than I thought. It wasn’t until two years ago that she split the original plant and brought half of it to me – by then it had gotten big enough that we could share it. So now that one little daylily that I bought for my son is at both of our houses. If she ever moves, it’s the only plant that I’ll make her dig up and move with her.