Full Sun to Partial Shade

The phlox is blooming in our front yard.

Vibrant fuchsia and lavender flowers on the rock wall are winking, saying, “Hey, sleepy one, get out of hibernation—it’s spring!”

When the phlox light up, I take note. I sit out on my patio in the morning and listen to the birds—as they return from the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, or The Villages—wherever they went when we hunkered down against the cold of winter.

The creeping phlox are always the first to wake up—along with the daffodils, tulips, and early-blooming azaleas. They watch dutifully as we prune last year’s shasta daisies and the long grasses we forgot to cut down in the fall.

There’s much to learn from phlox stolonifera. They sound mysterious, as if these flowers gleefully pilfer things from another garden bed. But stolonifera simply means a plant with stolons, “horizontal stems that produce adventitious roots and vertical stems at its nodes.”

I want adventitious roots! Don’t you?

These roots come through normal growth but also in response to stressful conditions such as flooding or nutrient deprivation. After wounding, growth arises through a leaf or a stem—something other than the primary root.

People need adventitious roots too. Roots that grow sideways from some part of us that has branched off.

Perhaps that’s what gets us through these long winters. As we reach out to connect with others and the world—seeking water, air, and sunlight where we can find it—we, too, can grow broad root systems to survive.

It makes me think of Alice Merton's Song "No Roots": "And a thousand times I've seen this road / a thousand times / I've got no roots / but my home was never on the ground."

Watching what is happening in India and Brazil with the coronavirus, I feel gratitude, blessings, and even a bit of shame for the phlox I have outside my home. For the vaccines in my arm that are there by choice. For the doctors or hospitals I can go to if I need them. For the garden beds I have to tend.

Stanley Kunitz—a wonderful poet and gardner—said in The Wild Braid, “Part of the fascination of gardening is that it is, on the one hand, a practical exercise of the human body and on the other, a direct participation in the ritual of birth and life and death.”

Life and death is palpable this year—it’s in the air we breathe. I feel it when I put my fingers in the dirt year after year—when we cut the catmint to make room for new blooms, when we pull weeds that are just starting to emerge from cracks in the stones. It’s there in dead patches in our lawn from the grubs or from the lack of rain last summer.

Yet even with the weight of this worldwide loss, a neighbor’s dog is barking. I hear another neighbor’s rooster crowing. A turkey was in the yard this morning spreading his tailfeathers in his full glory. The sun is out and warm on my skin. The river down the hill from our house is rushing with spring excitement.

This year, the river is spilling over the sides of its banks from snowmelt. It is finding its adventitious roots, too.