Drip Catchers

Day 197: I've dug and scratched and shovelled and scraped and sifted, and have thrown dozens upon dozens of Bluebell bulbs out of my garden and into the woods. Still the little buggers come back, year after year, worse than Lily-of-the-Valley (which, incidentally, I love). "Scilla," my mother called them, a relic of their former Latin appellation. Hyacinthoides non-scripta is what they go by these days: Common Bluebell, Hyacinth Bluebell, and for my nickel, they should be on the invasive species hit list. They'll crowd anything else out of a garden.

But then the other side of my brain kicks in, the non-scientific, artistic side, and I find myself thinking, "Yeah, but they're pretty," so the bulbs I pull get tossed onto the growing mound of turves at the margin of my woods. I'm building a berm by default, making a clearer boundary between forest and yard. "Naturalize your little heads off," I tell them as I pitch them onto the pile, and naturalize they do, but some of their kin will crop up in the flower beds again next year, more guests I wish I could send out to a motel. Frustrated, I dig them out again. "Go be pretty somewhere else!"

Then comes a moment when the elegance of their blossoms enchants me, recurved petals (tepals, if the truth be told) holding in precarious tension miniature gazing globes in which my garden is reflected. My demeanor softens under their subtle coercion and I permit them to stay, if in close preserves. My heart is not so hard that it cannot be moved by a simple flower waving its colors in the breeze.