The First Blossom of Healing

Three years ago on Easter, I preached about the two little apple trees I'd planted out in my front yard.

I preached about resurrection and the new life, to be fair, just like that day requires. But the framing image changes year by year, and that year, it was about them apples.

Wind back thirty-six months, I was homiletically marveling at the resilience of a dwarf Honeycrisp, one that had been brutally mangled by a stag.   Deer being what they are, my plans for the growth of that recent planting didn't matter a bit.  New antlers itched for their velvet stripped away, and the sapling was the unfortunate recipient of that desire.  It was reduced to nothing more than a branchless stick.

But as that sermon told it, to my surprise and despite it all, the tree was recovering.  The bark healing, and a few tender leaves were making their appearance.  

Go, little tree, go, I thought.  It's the sort of thing that stays with us, those of us who know how hard life can be.  I had good-hearted congregants ask, months later, hey, how's that little apple tree doing?

That was three years ago.  Though it's grown, it's a bit awkward, with irregular branches and a spotty canopy.  It leans a bit to the East, and has grown upwards as fast as it can, a single slender main trunk reaching skyward, as if attempting to depart this wounding earth.  

It has also, traumatized as it was, not once offered up even a single blossom.  Next to it, the squat Fuji I planted at the same time started producing sweet red apples last year, after blooming every single year.  But the Honeycrisp showed no such inclination, year after year.   Not a bud.  Not even a hint of budding.

Even so, I've tended to it, giving it a nice deep watering now and then when drought parched the soil to dust.

This last week, as I puttered about the yard weeding and amending soil, I went to inspect the trees.  The Fuji was a riot of pink-white flower.  And my wounded, struggling Honeycrisp?

There, far up the long snaking main trunk, a little couplet of blossoms high out of reach.

Healing takes its own time, and whenever it comes, it's welcome.  

Of Trauma and New Growth

I've been growing okra this year, mostly as an experiment to see how it fares in our ever warming Midatlantic climate.  

The answer, much to my surprise, was that it did fine, but underproduced at the height of our record-setting summer.  It's heat tolerant, yes, but once temperatures got up into the high nineties (that's mid-thirties for the rest of the world) growth and production slowed down.  That was compounded by a moderate drought, which stunted growth even more despite my best efforts at watering.  Nothing beats a good soaking rain, and that just wasn't forthcoming for much of the summer.

Yields were less than I expected, but still enough.  The usual territorial incursions of squirrels and chipmunks and wandering deer weren't present, which is often the case when you introduce a new and unfamiliar plant to the garden.  

I harvested and flash-froze dozens of pods for use in curries, where they have proved nutty and toothsome and utterly delicious.  Given that half of my family was from the South, I figured I'd also fry some up with cornmeal batter. 

The plants had great leaf growth, and as temperatures started to moderate a bit and the rains returned on a more regular basis, production ramped up.  Each okra blossomed with multiple flowers and growing pods, and it looked like I'd get that bumper crop I'd been hoping for...enough to start bringing some in to my churches' Little Free Produce Stand.

"Great," I thought to myself.  "This is working exactly according to plan."  Never think that.

Because that's right about when the deer hit.  

That's "deer," singular, or so my neighbor across the street told me.  Just one doe, unusually thin, that spent a good long while uprooting my early fall green bean plantings, and then dove voraciously into the okra.  The neighbor came over to shoo it away, but the deer seemed unphased.  It might, like a skeletal doe I encountered last year, have been suffering from wasting disease, which makes deer both listless, endlessly hungry, and utterly unafraid.

It was a massacre.  

Half of my plants had their flowers, all of their pods, and most of their leaves consumed.  That included my two most productive plants, which I'd hoped to use for seedsaving later in the season.  They were reduced to sad green twigs with short, mostly empty branches, only a few wan leaves hanging off here and there.  

I redoubled my application of anti-deer spray, which seemed to prevent another attack on the few okra that remained.

I turned my attention elsewhere in the garden.  I uprooted spent beans and tomatoes, amended the soil with homegrown compost, and got to replanting for the fall harvest.  

A few days later, I noticed that the ravaged okra was responding to trauma.  Not by withering, not by dying or surrendering to death, but by defiant regrowth.  

From the "elbows" between the main trunk and branches, the cells of the plant had repurposed themselves.  Fresh new leaves, delicate and hopeful, unfurling out of seemingly nothing, ready to catch the rays of the sun.  

From the abundant light of our G type main sequence star and a single minded vitality, the work of life would start again.

Gardens can be such heartening things.