How My Garden Grows

Lady Katy, angry lately

How does your garden grow?

Without your help, it's just as well,

Vines! Up and over, Go!

It's been dreadfully hot... and I worried all spring that I would'nt set these vines up to thrive when the drought came. I watered, and retied them as the wind beat the poor weak spindly vines against the fence. I whispered sweet things to the one vine that appeared dead, and watered it anyway, hoping it would eventually come around and catch up to it's siblings.

I've been known to nurture something so intensely that it gets used to the care, and then when I get distracted or have other things to attend to, it suffers as I pass it by each day until it's time to dive in and save it again. Enzo, our sick cat, has been the only exception. He can manipulate me into caring for him regardless of the circumstances. But other living things around here, Bart included, sometimes suffer from my attention span.

Grandma's moses in the cradle plant, for instance, sits drier than the sahara in my back window right now. I fought cutworms and fungus to keep the cutting alive and then got busy doing something else and now Mosie is almost toast.. burnt toast.

The muscadines appear to be a different breed. 5 of the 6 plants are over the 6' fence now, even with infrequent waterings. They're putting on new shoots, beautiful regular leaves, and amazingly - fighting the aphids and ants off on their own! And even the sickly vine that I might have given up on has 6 small perfect leaves, late for the party.

Every day I walk through my yard is a constant reminder that life goes on. It did before me, when vines like these grew by streams and rivers all over Texas. It does now, when the relentless heat and wind batter the poor vines with their intensity without my intervention. It will when I'm no longer nurturing them, and they're left to their environment to struggle up and over a fence on their own.

I love my grapes. When faced with adversity, they put out horizontal roots, grab on to what's nearby and flex as much as they can to survive and reach the next height. I have a lot to learn about living.