Mary Agria
| The Petoskey News-Review
A lot of the country including the Upper Midwest is a giant snowglobe right now. All that cold, slush and ice seem very far removed from the first warming day of spring. Meanwhile, we gardener folk cope as best we can.
In fact, right now my husband and I are exiled from our Michigan gardens, trying to turn marsh marigold seeds into attractive new plant life for our sun-starved, north-facing Arizona container “pond” (aka my grandmother’s 25 gallon pickle crock). Hoping that the instructions from the Wisconsin grower to “harden” the seeds in the freezer before planting were unduly pessimistic, my husband planted a few seeds right away in our countertop hydroponic garden. The result? Nada.
So after 30 days in the freezer, out came a few more seeds for another trial run — to no avail. In fact the hardening time could be up to 60 days the instructions on the seed packet said. There are still enough seeds left to give this a try. By then in our desert climate, temperatures akin to a Midwestern spring will be more common — so the plan is to try plantings in both the indoor hydroponic system and our outdoor grow box.
If we succeed, the next step will be to move the colorful bloomers to our outdoor Michigan pond for the summer and fall. Wishful thinking, perhaps. But with fond memories of the golden flowered marsh marigolds standing knee-deep in the swampy woods near my family’s Wisconsin home, I wholeheartedly find myself sharing my spouse’s enthusiastic attempt to “domesticate” these lovely wildflowers.
In some ways, that new high-risk obsession may sound of out-of-character for me. Every summer I find it very hard to treat plants as “disposable” and will go to great lengths to gift anything and everything I “thin out” to friends, neighbors and anyone who will have them. Still, I believe our marigold adventure is in a different category entirely.
“If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener,” the beloved North Carolina horticulturist Dr. J.C. Raulston once wrote. Gardening is never a “sure thing.” Weather extremes, rainfall, storms, drought and insect invasions all have the potential to thwart our best-laid garden plans. And for multi-climate gardeners especially, the challenges and learning curves can be steep. If it is guarantees we want, we would never break sod or plant a seed.
Bottom line, whatever comes of our marigold project, it is certainly one way of making the winter go faster. And in the process, we are reminding ourselves of what ultimately gardening is all about: challenge and persistence, risk and hope, experiments and failures as well as successes.
Author of the 2006 regional best-selling novel “Time in a Garden,” Mary Agria is an 8-time first prize winner of the Michigan Garden Club’s statewide feature writing contest. Her “An Itinerant Gardener’s Book of Days,” gardening novels and books on gardening and spirituality are available online and from local bookstores.
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