Pop 89: Consider the Petunia
By Madonna Hamel
This year, I decided not to worry about growing vegetables. I accept that my green thumb does not extend beyond flowers and herbs; I have offered weeding services to friends in exchange for the occasional bunch of carrots or head of lettuce.
Flowers are as necessary as potatoes; they are soul food. And I need more floral nourishment as the years progress. I go to a garden centre like I go to church, filling my spirit with the heavenly scents and colours of thousands of plants gathered under one roof. This year, I am particularly enamoured with the centre at The Wholesale Club, due to the unceasing labour of love of the young man in charge. All season he waters, prunes and dead-heads with care. The plants positively sing!
I arrive late in the day. Even at the end of the season, the tables are full of petunias, still trumpeting; herbs curl and climb out of their confining little boxes; teeny tiny peppers and tomatoes bead stalks; and exotic semi-succulents burst bold and unfazed by the intense heat.
I greet the young Filipino man who informs me that "everything is 24 cents." "What? Everything? Everything. Can it be? Pinch me! I must be dreaming!" "No, it's true," says an older woman. She waves a bill in the air, explaining that her 93-year-old mom gave it to her for giving her a pedicure. "It's only ten bucks, but I thought, ok, I'll go buy a couple of new plants. But I can buy fifty with this!"
A young man with two shopping carts full of plants keeps giggling with glee. "I hardly wait to see my wife's face when she gets a load of this!" he laughs, waving his hand over the carts. "She's gonna kill me!" I respond: "Until you tell her the price, right?" And sure enough, when we wheel our treasures inside to pay, he laughs again, this time at the sight of her holding her hands to her face in shock.
Plant people are like dog people; we don't need to know each other's names, we are kin in our kinship with living things. These are life's big small joys - not the just the bargain, but the glee shared by strangers.
In her book "Braiding Sweetgrass," Anishinaabe writer and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the earth and the natural world being animate beings. She calls this 'animacy.' "Plants feed us, shelter us, clothe us, keep us warm," she says. "Who else can take light, air, and water and give it away for free? They are models of generosity. They are our teachers." One way she respects 'animacy' is by referring to plants, earth, and animals as "kin", which is a variant on the Anishinaabe word "aki," meaning earthly being.
One of my favourite saints from childhood is St. Francis. He, too, felt kinship with plants and animals. And planets. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. He preached to critters. When I lived with my dad in Kelowna, I loved going to the blessing of the animals mass on St. Francis' feast day, when Father Pat would bless a rambunctious menagerie of furry and feathered kin, as if they too were his flock.
Sometimes, all it takes to calm a worried brain is to "consider the lilies. They do not toil or spin."
The new pope has added a new mass to the Catholic missal that "we may learn to live in harmony with all creatures." The biblical readings include selections from the Gospel of Matthew that recount Jesus "calling people to trust in divine providence through the lilies of the field and the birds of the air."
"This new mass is a reason for joy," said Cardinal Czerny, the Canadian cardinal partly in charge of carrying out Pope Francis' Laudato Si' ecology project, involving a space for education and training in integral ecology at the Castel Gondolfo gardens in Italy, where the first new mass will be celebrated by the new pope. "It increases our gratitude, strengthens our faith and invites us to respond with care and love in an ever-growing sense of wonder, reverence and responsibility."
"Wonder, reverence and responsibility." I would concur that we could all use more of these attributes. And I find they grow in me whenever I enter a garden centre. I'd even dare say that the young man and older woman felt the same way, spurred in part by the example of the young Filipino man. In our present world, where glib and sarcastic so-called "influencers" and "thought leaders" lead with cynicism, irreverence and irresponsibility, child-like enthusiasm is a life-saving balm.
Whenever I look at a pot of flaming zinnias or gerbera, I can't help but laugh out loud - as if their bold petals reflected a perennial sense of humour. A pot of fuchsias is a mini-universe of multi-skirted dancers, a bleeding heart begs us to slow down and open our own hardened, frightened hearts.
As for reverence, if I read one more book blurb promising a new novel to be a "delightfully irreverent look at modern life," I'm going to scream. When has irreverence ever served as the best solution to disillusionment? That we don't 'revere' our planet, our neighbours, the fact of our own existence, is not a cause for "delight". But it does call for a new liturgy of life - able to respond in ways that aren't dismissive and denigrating.
The glib manner in which we divert the world's troubles, keeping us stewed in self-absorption, makes me anxious to move past this smart-ass adolescent phase in which humanity loiters and languishes. Maybe we could all get out of ourselves by buying a plant. Water it. Give it sunlight. Behold it. Watch it grow, along with our sense of wonder. Heed the trumpet trill of the wave petunias, and instead of flipping the bird at the world, wave back!