My Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

William Carlos Williams

Here, I must begin with a confession. I did not actually plant the dahlias that we grew at our first home in Austin. Andrew and I moved into this home together in the summer of 2019. It was a cute house with basic landscaping, mostly tiny boxwoods, and I felt that left a lot to be desired.

Piquing My Interest

My husband likes to joke about my online shopping habits, how I’ll order something and forget about it by the time it arrives. The phenomenon seems to also occur at Costco… An item looks appealing to me, I put it in my cart, and then somehow it’s still a surprise at checkout to see what I’m coming home with. This was the case with the dahlia tuber variety pack. I tossed it in my cart with zero game plan for how they would actually be consumed, or in this case planted, but I knew somehow (probably via my husband) it would happen.

A month or so after my Costco trip, my in-laws happened to be visiting, and my husband suggested that we plant the dahlias. Andrew’s mom is a very experienced gardener who grows and cans her own vegetables each year, and Andrew’s dad is a bona-fide expert on lawn care. Among the three of them was a wealth of horticultural knowledge, and there were only two shovels. Plus, I wasn’t really interested in getting my hands dirty at the time. So, I would say that my involvement that day could be called “supervision,” at best.

In the weeks that it took for the dahlia sprouts to unearth themselves, Covid-19 started to spread in the US. Andrew and I found ourselves barely leaving the house to limit our exposure to the virus, looking for new sources of entertainment. We tried our hand at home improvement projects, too. Maybe one day, I’ll post about the Great Toilet-Flashlight Fiasco of 2020, if the well gets really dry for content here at Benson’s Best Buds. I cooked a lot of authentic Italian recipes, got into that banana bread phase of quarantine, and soon enough, I started taking a greater interest in our garden.

These dahlias grew alright – the planters at our old house were located in areas that received less-than-ideal amounts of sunlight, and later in the summer, they seemed to suffer from spider mites. The other type of dahlia included in the value pack never produced a bloom, and I didn’t catch its name from the packaging.

Upon This Zinnia, My Garden Will Grow

After cutting my first dahlia, I ordered some zinnia seeds to try my hand at growing flowers on my own. They were direct-sowed into our front and back yards around the Fourth of July, just approximately five months later than their ideal time to sow. I also planted watermelon seeds that grew some pitiful sprouts, but nothing more.

Daily, sometimes every few hours if I really was trying to procrastinate, I would check on my zinnias. Haven’t you heard? They grow faster the more frequently you check on them; it’s exactly like getting water to boil and paint to dry.

My sowing didn’t produce anywhere near the yield I had hoped for – I literally got one flower – but I loved the experience of caring for a plant and knowing that the work I put in along the way produced the resulting bloom.

I had made a deal with myself that I would see how things went with my zinnias before “investing” further in my garden. Of course, I didn’t stick to it. By September, I had ordered fall-planted ranunculus corms, tulip and daffodil bulbs, and a number of roots that attract pollinators. And then, I pre-ordered some dahlias to plant in the spring.

In a way, all of my future flowers will exist because of that one red zinnia, and it reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ poem, The Red Wheelbarrow. That red zinnia was my Red Wheelbarrow, and everything I grow from this moment on depends on it.