The Thorny Path to Growth

“As we attempt to understand ourselves and our struggles with life’s endeavors, we may find peace in the observation of a flower. Ask yourself: At what point in a flower’s life, from seed to full bloom, does it reach perfection?” – Thomas M. Sterner

Hey folks,

I’m tired of looking outside at my dormant rose bushes. So, I figured I’d share with you how my rose garden got started. It’s also an excuse to go back through my photos and remind myself that the sunshine will return soon.

In the Winter of 2020, I decided I wanted to be a rose gardener. My partner, closest friends, and allies wouldn’t describe me as a planner. I’m more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-er kind of gal. But I was getting the hang of planning for the sunlight to be short and the days to be teeming with stories of loss and grief. And for the melancholic beat of my heart to rise with the moon as it peeked beyond the blackened tips of the silhouetted trees outside my farmhouse windows. Weary from being a therapist at the height of the global pandemic, I felt something about myself was slowly dying, and I needed to launch a counterattack. Growing new roses fit the bill.

So, I began getting the rose catalogs in the mail. Do you know the difference between a hybrid tea rose, and a floribunda rose?

No?

Me neither.

Thumbing through the glossy pages and I scrawled the names of the ones that I found to be the most beautiful in my nearly worn-out journal.

Drop Dead Red.

Dark Night.

The McCartney.

Neptune.

Black Baccara.

New Dawn.

The list grew and grew to eleven different bushes. And like most people shopping online, I got a shot of dopamine when I hit the check-out button. I tried to imagine the garden and choose contrasting colors. And that is about as far as my planning went.

I had to wait for the winter to pass. For the midwestern morning frosts to cease. Unannounced, they arrived in a big cardboard shipping box. Eleven bundles of bare roots, short branches, and thorns. They were dormant, but they looked dead, like the brown sticks that fall from the maple trees after a gust of wind. Like the stick your dog finds in the grass and proudly brings you to throw back into the grass for him to retrieve a dozen times. Except these sticks had thorns. Some the size of a quarter and others the size of a kitten’s claw. Both are as sharp as a switchblade without the benefit of a sheath. How on Earth would these sticks and thorns end up like the pictures in the catalog?

True to form, I was wholly unprepared for their arrival. Armed with gifts and tokens from loved, I had spare compost from my partner’s vegetable garden and a shovel. For Christmas, my mom gifted me a pair of pruning shears, and leather gardening gloves. So, while maybe I had the tools to plant these thorny sticks, I certainly had not taken the time to acquire the knowledge needed to turn into a rose gardener.

Yet, I expected myself to perfectly execute the planting and growing of the rose garden.

I was standing over the box of dormant roses and chiding myself for never being prepared enough and lamenting my probable failure at being a successful gardener of this beloved bloom.

And then I caught myself mid-lamentation.

I chuckled. With my gloved hands perched on my hips, and I hovered over the thorns and stem. I spoke to them I was telling a story to an old friend:

“This isn’t the first time I have done something like this. Oh no-no-no. This is one of many times that I have tried to learn something new and just run with it. And expect perfection to be the result. We’re going to be okay, though.”

In my quest to become a rose gardener, I had apparently forgotten that I am not a fan of getting my hands dirty. I pouted, not because I don’t like dirt, but because I needed to ask for help, a skill that does not come easily to me as a born and bred pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Midwesterner.

“Uh, hey, so… I know I said I didn’t need help, but can you please help me dig the holes?” Without hesitation, she suited up in her overalls with me.

We had to race against a fast-setting sun while an early spring rain began to fall, hitting our raincoats sound like the early moments of popcorn in the microwave. Each bush’s roots were buried in Indiana earth. It looked like we planted dead sticks. Nothing special to look at.

I grew nervous. I was anxious for them to grow and bloom. As each day passed, I wondered if I did it right. A late frost came; I covered them in mounds of dirt to protect them as the directions said. But would they make it?

“Can’t you hurry up and grow and bloom already?” I walked amongst them each morning with my coffee and scolded their lack of progress. I pleaded with them to show me that I had done a good job even though I hadn’t prepared for them.

“Now, wait for just a second, Ellie,” I tell myself. Coffee in one hand, the other hand back on my hip as I sheepishly gaze down at my feet. “Are you really blaming the roses for your impatience? Why did you even want to be a rose gardener, anyways?”

It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the learning process, but it is that I forget that is where happiness lies. In western society, we are trained to be driven and to strive for the product. We, to our detriment, are not encouraged to embrace the process. But that is where the adventure is born. The story about the camera mishap had been on my mind. I sighed and left the garden with an empty coffee mug and a plan.

I learned the difference between a hybrid tea rose, and a floribunda rose was mainly their flowers. While floribunda roses re-flower regularly, hybrid tea roses tend to bloom three times a season. And which one is fragrant? The hybrid tea. And the floribundas tend not to have a smell at all. There are over a hundred species of roses, and most are native to Asia. Thorns are technically called “prickles.”

I read rose gardening blogs. I read about fertilizer types and soil quality. When to prune? Before 10 a.m. How to prune? Cut at a 45-degree angle and wash the sheers before switching bushes to prevent the spread of illness. I committed to being a rose gardener. I committed to focusing on the process.

And then they started blooming.

And I started asking myself — at what point is the rose perfect?

Was it perfect as a seed, before any of the elements of Earth had a chance to manipulate it, before the sun had a chance to burn it? Or was it perfect when the first shoot snuck up through the ground like how nightcrawlers breach the Earth after a rain? Was it perfect before the bloom even formed? Or was it the bud that housed the petals before it was exposed to the sun and the preying beetles?

And then I realized — it doesn’t matter. Because the rose does not know of imperfection or shame, or vulnerability. It doesn’t ask itself, “how the hell did I get here?” and dwell on the past or fret over the future. It was once a seed on a path to thorns, petals, and pollen. And it just grew.

The bush learns to adapt to its environment the best it can. And if the environment is too harsh, yes, it will die. But in its life, though it might be plagued with beetles or aphids, it does not know to worry about when or if it will ever be perfect. So why should I? They don’t worry about their mistakes when they didn’t know any better. So why should I? They don’t get caught up in wondering how the hell they got to this point in their life. They are just there, growing in the moments that are given to them.

In learning to become a rose gardener, my research about the rose bush life cycle revealed nothing about how the flower wilts and dies. Or how long the bush’s lifespan is. In nature, it is presumed to go on and on, flowing through states of impermanence until something about its environment changes that no longer supports its life or until it grows too old. Still, even then, the bushes’ roots are resilient, and the rose can rebloom.

Though parts of us die with our self-perception of the befores and afters. Before the diagnosis. After the diagnosis. Before they died. After they died. Before the accident. After the accident. Before the storm and after the storm.

Are we not like the roses? Some are tall, some small. Some fragrant, some bland. A diversity of experiences, each thriving in different environments. Our lives but little adventures wrapped in the splendor of soft, vulnerable petals and grown from prickles and adversity.

And now, in early 2023, I find myself at another crossroads in life. There is a lot of hope at this crossing. Together, I hope that we can collectively explore how our lives are not one bloom, but a cycle of blooms that grow and die in perpetual impermanence. Always a work in progress until the Earth reclaims us for her own.

In connection,

Ellie