Contact Me

If you enjoy my blog and would like to contact me, you may reach me at this email: dena.netherton@gmail.com

Some of my stories are published in:
A Cup of Comfort Devotional for Mothers and Daughters (Adams Media, 2009)
Chicken Soup: What I Learned from the Dog (2009)
Love is a Flame (Bethany House, 2010)
Extraordinary answers to Prayer (Guideposts, 2010)
Love is a Verb (Bethany House, 2011)
Big Dreams from Small Spaces (Group Publishing, 2012)

Monday, January 4, 2010

Bulbs

My sister-in-law, Marjorie, is talented like Martha Stewart. Her home looks like something out of one of those fancy house and garden magazines I occasionally browse when I'm waiting in a doctor's office. And she can cook, too. My brother Royce says, "Why go out when I can have a meal ten times better at home?"
Marjorie knows just about every type of plant that grows in the western half of the U.S. She studied to become a landscape designer. When she looks at a shrub or flower she knows what kind of soil it needs, how much sunlight, its water requirements, whether it can survive a freeze, and if the plant is disease resistant.

Me?
I know a handful of plants, trees and flowers. I live in a cedar-sided house in the Colorado Rockies at an elevation of 8000 feet. I'd love to have a flower garden in my front yard, but what the cold won't kill off, the elk and deer will devour.

Last year my mother sent me one of those plant containers filled with bulbs. You take the container out of its mailing box, remove all the packing peanuts, place in a sunny window and give it a little water each day.
In about a week something begins to come up through the soil. The shipping tag said that the bulbs are tulips. Just tulips. I don't know what kind.
To me a bulb could send up a lily, an Iris, a crocus, a tulip, or whatever. It's only when the flower opens that I go, "ahh, isn't that beautiful. . . it's a. . . " They look like those photos of fields of tulips outside Portland, Oregon.
I watched those beautiful tulips grow tall, then open and radiate their glory in the sun of my Southerly exposed office window. They were beautiful for about two weeks, then the flowers faded. The long green leaves continued for much longer. Then they, too, shriveled. I cut them down to the dirt, covered it with spanish moss and stored the container in the garage.
I'd heard that bulbs thus stored would bring up more plants the next year. Marjorie probably could have told me exactly and scientifically how to store my sleeping bulbs.

This past December ('09), out of curiosity I took the tulip container back inside. I watched the whole process start up again. Amazing! A little later than the first December's emergence, but I know - by the shoots - that in anther week I will enjoy those gorgeous blooms again.

I am like a little child in my wonder and admiration of the plant process. It makes me wonder about the whole of life and the awesome intellect that planned and carried out creation.

In the time it took to write this post a tulip has opened. I wish you could see it.

"God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." (Genesis 1:31)

2 comments:

  1. I wish I could see that tulip.
    It is wonderful that you took care of those bulbs properly so that you could enjoy them for a second year, and I am guessing that with the results you are having you will repeat the process.
    I have a Christmas Catus that blooms so beautifully for me each December. Flowers in the middle of winter how wonderful.
    Happy New Year
    Diane

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  2. Oh Diane, I love Christmas Cactus. Just thinking about it makes me want to go down to the nursery and get one.
    Actually, I have two pots, now. One is all tulips and the new one has crocus,a hyacinth and some kind of lily. The crocus opened yesterday but the others are teasing me as yet.

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