Growing Mysteries

I find the garden a pretty humbling experience. It may be especially mysterious to me because I am so conventionally ignorant. This year, anyway, after perhaps four years of trying to grow anemones, we have some. A lot, actually. It’s not entirely clear why, but there are some possibilities. Other animals like to eat the anemone corms, for example, and if they do, not only don’t the flowers grow properly, but you can’t even dig up the corms to keep them dry for the following year.  So we put them in a lot of pots in the greenhouse.  They need a bit of cold, too, so I tried to get in the habit of leaving the greenhouse door open this year, something of a challenge. We did something right, in any case. They are truly glorious — and still coming. There is something about relationships with plants, like relationships with people, that demands reciprocity, some tacit agreement to let yourself take cues, be controlled by the plants.

Somewhere other than either active and passive “voices” in English, say, between “I grow the anemones” and “the anemones are grown by me,” something that does go as far as reversing the roles, as in “the anemones grow me,” there might be a form of “grow” that does designate subject and object: There is a growing that involves me and the anemones.