I bought my first house—light gray with white trim, like all the other new builds in my leafy, sleepy suburb of New York City—in 2007. The outside was surrounded by plants that I largely left alone. The first sign of spring was a shock of canary yellow forsythia in the side yard, followed by soft pink blooms on the Japanese maple by the driveway. Come summer, July brought sapphire-blue pom-poms on the hydrangea bush by the front door.
Every year I resolved not to touch any of it. I knew nothing about gardening (I owned nary a trowel!), and I wasn’t going to screw things up. So it was a surprise to me when, about 10 years in, I found myself gravitating toward a crowd buzzing with excitement in the Costco garden center as if it were a shoe sale. They peered into one another’s carts with delight that bordered on envy, electrified by their treasure. Surely they knew something I didn’t.
One woman in jeans and a heavily pocketed jacket had a cart full of white paper bags. I wanted to know everything. What was in the bags? What was in all those pockets? How was she going to spend the rest of the day?
“They’re peony bulbs,” she told me, holding one up so I could see the pink flower on the label. When I asked the obvious follow-up question, she replied, “I’m going to put them in the ground.”
Put them in the ground!
I loved the sound of this, both industrious and hopeful. I took a single bagged bulb off the shelf and put it in my cart. It sat on my kitchen counter for a week. My kids asked me about it, and I told them with the confidence of a woman with extra pockets that I too was going to “put it in the ground.” Once you say something to my kids you must do it or they’ll hound you, so one Sunday I found a space between two box hedges. I sat in the dirt and dug a hole with my hands. I’ll admit it felt a little foolish. Shoving what resembled a rotten onion into the earth and hoping for flowers seemed like rubbing a bald guy’s head for good luck.
The following May, I noticed a few sticks emerging from the ground in the same spot. The May after that, the sticks were taller, and there was a single flower—silky, like a small evening bag, and the color of red wine. I called my family out to see it.
“I made this flower,” I told them. “This must be like what God feels.” So much eye-rolling. That flower lived three days before the spring rains came and scattered its petals all over my lawn.
The sticks came back the following year with three flowers, then five. Always in little buds by the first of May and always in full bloom on Mother’s Day. After a decade, my peony bush got so big I bought support stakes to hold it up. I took photos and posted them online, prompting unwitting strangers to ask me for gardening advice. (Surely God must know this kind of pride.)
In all of this, I want to reach for a metaphor about creation with regard to my children or my novels, but that doesn’t feel quite right. I toiled over children and novels. So much lost sleep and worry, so many tiny yet critical decisions. Sending them out into the world not when they were ready, but when I was out of time. This annual burst of cabernet-colored flowers was born of nothing more than a whim and a wish, and yet it continues to thrive, all on its own. The best $5.99 I’ve ever spent.
—Annabel Monaghan is the author of Nora Goes Off Script and the forthcoming Dolly All the Time.
