If you know me, you know I love working in my garden. It’s such a joy to be outside, to connect to the earth, to design the landscape and nurture the yard while also allowing it to be what it wants to be.
Hibiscus is one of my favorite plants because of the giant blooms it offers at certain times of the year. This plant thrives in Savannah during the warm and humid months (of which we have many) yet I usually keep my hibiscus in containers so that I can move them into the garage during the occasional cold snap.
My plants are like my children and some of them have been with me for years. I’ve even carried some from one location to another when I have moved. There is one hibiscus in particular that I have had for almost a decade. I think I paid $5 for it and brought it home when it was just a wee little baby, and it has grown into a plant that today is taller than I am!
However, about a year ago, I almost lost my little buddy. It got especially cold a couple of winters ago and even though I moved my friend into the garage it still withered and lost all its leaves. When I put it back out in the yard last spring I cut all the branches back to almost nothing. I almost gave up on it. It looked like a bunch of sticks in a nice pot.
I read somewhere that you can tell if a plant is still alive by scratching it with your fingernail near the base of the branch. If there is green showing where you scratched it, there’s still life in the plant. I tried that and sure enough there was green and a little moisture, just a little, down around the base barely above the dirt.
Life is everywhere present all the time. Sometimes we are called to take a closer look.
So I didn’t give up on it! I kept doing everything I could think of to make it happy and to remember that there was still life in it. I kept thinking about how Jesus supposedly cursed a fig tree as he was leaving the temple one day, and I was determined not to curse this little tree, my friend, but to bless it and nurture it and encourage it to LIVE to the best of my ability.
Sure enough, this year it is green and thriving and ALIVE and giving us some of the most magnificent deep orange/red blooms I have ever seen. I am so happy every time I go outside and see what it has offered, because it reminds me not to give up when things look bleak.
Life is everywhere present all the time. Sometimes we are called to look past appearances and take a closer look. If we continue to affirm Life and not give in to the temptation to give up, we can align with the idea that Life is always with us, even when it’s hard to see. In time we are amazed at the wonder we behold because we chose to persevere.
