Weeping over Alliums

I have discovered a love for gardening. Over the last number of years, I have been blessed to have the opportunity to play in the dirt, and I have been putting in raised beds, planting plants, pruning trees and bushes, and so on. Some things have been a success -- the raised beds I put in last year grew several meals of delicious fresh peas and beans, as well as loads of lettuce. Some things have gone fairly well -- the carrots and beets were small but delicious. Some things have been an unmitigated disaster. I did not harvest a single pepper off of nine plants -- they grew fruit but never ripened, and the squirrels stole almost all of the few heritage-variety tomatoes before I could get to them.

I really have no clue what I'm doing. I basically bung a plant in the ground and watch what happens. I've discovered that you really can kill forsythia by pruning it back too hard. Then again, maybe it was already dying; it hadn't flowered for years. Full sun apparently means more than four hours a day.  Clay is hard work. So is shade. And so is a yard prone to flooding after heavy rain.

And "deer and rabbit resistant" is a lie.

Or maybe it was squirrels.

Last fall, I planted 25 allium bulbs, and 25 camassia bulbs. "Attracts bees", they said. "Deer and rabbit resistant," they said. Heaven knows that's critical in our yard, where three or four rabbits can be seen frolicking about on any given evening, and everyone knows that where there are three or four, there are actually dozens.

They came up with a flourish this spring. All of them. Within days, the rabbits were eating at the new leaves of the camassias. They left the alliums alone -- of course they did. Alliums are of the onion family and taste and smell distinctly like their more bulbous cousins. But apparently the camassias were fine eating. So, I cut the bottoms out of flower pots and yogurt containers, and surrounded each emerging shoot with a protective cone. When the plants were a bit bigger, I figured they'd be ok on their own.

It worked. And so my camassias and alliums grew and thrived and send up a host of promising buds. I had visions of a sea of purple pompoms and blue spires. (Ok, probably a sea was overly optimistic. More like a shallow pond. But still. And the best part of alliums, at least, is that they readily self-seed, and so I knew that next year, I'd have a lake's worth of purple pompoms.)

And then it happened. I woke up one Sunday morning and took the dog out and discovered that of my 25 beautiful alliums, 18 of them had been beheaded and the foliage trampled. The buds lay scattered about my garden, snapped off and discarded.

By 9:00 that evening, every other allium had met the same fate.

I stood in my back garden and bawled my eyes out.

I literally cried myself to sleep that night.

Over alliums.

But it wasn't really over alliums. It was the disappointment. The failed expectations. The hard work that didn't pay off. The promise that wasn't fulfilled. It was this whole year.

It was a year that started off bright and full of promise, and it has twisted into this blighted awful thing that just goes on and on and is one loss followed by another. We couldn't get together for Easter. Mother's Day was a write-off. Victoria Day weekend was a washout on so many levels. Graduations are cancelled. Shootings in Nova Scotia. One day, the Snowbirds flew directly over our yard while I was out working, and it was awesome to see them, and a few days later, one of them crashed. Sorrow upon sorrow, disappointment upon disappointment, and my alliums were just one more thing, and I cried like I haven't cried in months. Over all of it. Over this whole messed-up year, and our whole messed-up world, including my beautiful alliums that weren't eaten, just wantonly destroyed. An ocean of purple turned into a river of tears.

And that's the way of grief so often. It builds. Sometimes I don't even know that I'm grieving, and then I find myself overreacting to something innocuous (although having every allium beheaded isn't exactly innocous, except in the grand scheme of things). I could have told myself to buck up, to not be silly. I could have scolded myself for my tears. I could have reminded myself that they are just alliums, and they'll grow back next year, and rabbits (or squirrels) will be rabbits (or squirrels). But I didn't. I let myself cry. I knew it wasn't just the alliums. And I cried with God. I told him this year sucked. I told him I was ready for it to be over. I told him I hated rabbits and squirrels with a holy hatred that verged on unholy hatred. (I even texted my brother to see if he had an air rifle I could use to send the varmints to their eternal home. You will be glad to know he did not, and no wildlife has been injured in the creating of this garden. Cages are, however, prolific.)

I told him I was sad and that I missed my old life, the life where I felt safe and in control. I told him how hard it was to trust him to be in control when I felt so out of control and vulnerable. I cried and I prayed, and I prayed and I cried until I fell asleep.

I still feel sad often. And that's ok. I feel happy, too. My camassias, also in bud, were protected forthwith, with cages. It wasn't quite the look I was going for, but it did the trick. The camassias survived and have begun flowering. They are quite beautiful, unfolding above their cages.





















It's the way of today, it seems. We bloom. Within cages, perhaps, but we bloom.

The rabbits (or squirrels, but my bet is on rabbits) didn't behead quite all the alliums. They left one. It was the one most accessible. And it seems fitting that they left it.

It's fasciated. Twisted and blighted. Just like this year.

And yet ... somehow ... still trying to carry on, to do what it was created to do, beautiful in its own odd way.

That's somehow comforting. If my one remaining allium can carry on, then perhaps I can, too.