Perennial

My aunt is teaching me that when you’re planting a garden with perennials, the key is to know when to cut them back to encourage growth for the next year.

There are specific points where you cut them – with knockoff roses, for example, there are bulbs that you cut in front of, to entice the new cherry brown leaf growth to pull in the bright carnation-red flowers. Those roses came with the home. They sit in the backyard, watching the estuary and the cattails. The tide coming in and out, in and out. You and I both agreed on our first date that roses are incredibly overrated.

There’s a Mexican Cornflower, that spreads across the ground, making snow angels in the mulch – its leaves stretched, reaching out in a wide hug. She explains that you trim those stems more carefully. The deep indigo of the petals reminds me of the way the Atlantic Ocean looks on a cloudy day – like when we watched the sunrise together, my back to your chest, your shirt keeping me warm. You told me that you didn’t like cloudy sunrise mornings. I mentioned that the dramatic effect of the sun coming out from behind the clouds was one of my favorite things to photograph. You hummed when you looked at my photo, and your sea-green eyes crinkled as you nodded.

There’s this plum leafed bush that my aunt doesn’t remember the name of, but there are a bunch around her front yard, standing sentry by the palmetto trees. She chops them all back every year, down to the trunks, and every year they return, bigger and brighter than ever. She gets her husband to help her push those red bushes back. Sometimes, working with plants requires more than one gardener. It is similar to an ex – consistently returning, coming back into one’s life, no matter how many times you cut them all the way back.

My aunt walks me through her yard, explaining in layman’s terms about how plants work, about how she works with them, about the push and pull relationship between a gardener and her plants. She stands in the middle of her front garden and raises her arms, exuberantly chanting, “grow my babies, grow!” The blanket she has wrapped around her shoulders, to brush away the chill of the springtime South Carolina clouds, begins to slide down her back. The sun peeks through. Then she laughs, and a giggle grows out of me, contagious.

Plants and humans aren’t all that different from each other. We all require sun and water. We want good, strong roots with ample space to grow. Sometimes, no matter what precautions are taken, our flowers wilt. Cutting us back encourages growth. Even if we don’t want to be cut back. The sudden, harsh stop of the cut plants almost outweighs the very small image of the bloom in the back, closer to the stem.

That’s what you want to encourage, my aunt tells me. Not always the buds out in front; the ones that bloom too quick. You want the ones that are hidden. The buds that hang at the back of the plant. The ones you nurture. The ones that seem on the edge of disappearing, only to reappear more brilliant than imagined. You have to be patient. Those are the ones that bloom year after year.