Old-Timey Petunias

Old-Timey Petunias

It was the middle of May, our fourth Spring as spouses, and I did not expect us to see a fifth. Our marital road had become riddled with potholes of unmet expectations and growing discontentment. We weren’t speaking one another’s love language, and we weren’t speaking much that was meaningful in the English language either. That was when a horticultural development threatened to usher in divorce proceedings before becoming the unlikely catalyst of renewed wedding vows.

Going out to eat on Saturday nights should have felt like date nights. At best, we were going through the motions, and at worst, we were acting out of obligation. She didn’t have to cook, and I didn’t have to be the punching bag for the blows of frustration she’d unleash on me if we didn’t eat out. At least we were acting like a happy couple. She would invariably figure out ways to add a shopping side trip to the schedule, another dose of retail therapy for her and more weekend misery for me.  

Our car hadn’t even made it out of the driveway when it happened. She wouldn’t know until years later how close her comment had come to starting World War III. “I think those weeds are gonna swallow the porch. People probably drive by and think our house looks like Sanford & Son.” If my wife hadn’t inherited any other trait from her mother, she got every ounce of her penchant for well-timed and frequently used passive aggression. God bless my mother-in-law and those strong genes.

Her observation would seem innocuous enough to the impartial observer. I wasn’t an impartial observer, though. What I heard the loudest were the words she had not spoken. She meant, “I wonder how long it will take you to do something about those weeds. Will this be one more thing that I’ll have to keep asking you to do, so you can again accuse me of nagging you?”

At that moment, it would not have been wise for me to have offered any response. I was tired, ‘today tired’ and ‘a few hard months tired.’ We had just moved into this house, and moving is stressful enough. Our new place felt only a little larger than a shoebox, about sixty percent of the square footage of our previous house. For four months, I had been a full-time member of the family crew executing a total home renovation. On nights and weekends during that time, I had labored to restore some semblance of order to a yard that had been neglected for the better part of a decade.

I was hungry, and we all know the anger that follows hunger. I could have been eating at that very moment. Instead, I’d enjoy the privilege of a half-hour commute and at least that much more time standing in line. Among my wife’s many gifts, she had incredible intuition for timing it so that we’d arrive at a restaurant squarely in the middle of the evening rush.

If being tired and hungry weren’t enough, her painful obliviousness to the obvious was more gas on the fire of my sour disposition. Most of my day had been spent mowing the lawn, gathering more limbs and debris for a bonfire waiting to happen, and hauling the week’s trash to the dump. Her day had been spent laying out for three hours and then going shopping. Not shopping for groceries or necessities, mind you. She went shopping for more clothes that she didn’t need, but she couldn’t stop buying. She had played all day, I had worked all day, and now we were headed to a restaurant halfway across the county because none of the dozen dining options within five minutes were satisfactory to her.

More than a few potential replies were swirling in my brain, fighting to be the one that would settle before making the way to my vocal cords. “Those weeds weren’t even there a week ago, but I’m sorry I missed them while I’ve been working on the other 1.3 acres.” “This place looked like Tarzan not so long ago; I’d say Sanford & Son is a slight improvement.”  “Your hands and feet are working just fine. It won’t bother me if you pick up a hoe and chop them yourself.” “Since it’s not enough for you that I’m working six days a week, I’ll add Sundays to my schedule and take care of them tomorrow.” I was able to find a tiny thread of restraint because our evening was only beginning. If my wife had voiced the same comment in the same way when we were returning home, the scene in the car would have been marked by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As a husband, I had never wanted to unleash a tirade on her in my worst moments until then.

If I’m being honest, I was also mad because she wasn’t wrong. Whatever those weeds were, they must have had some kudzu in them because they were multiplying rapidly. Their tips were almost above the height of the home’s front porch on all three sides, detracting from the appearance of our fresh remodel. And, I did have a knack for promising to get around to things that would remain undone. Still, I wasn’t spending my days golfing or fishing and my nights playing video games. Nothing prevented her from getting her own hands dirty in the landscaping department. But I’m so glad she didn’t.

Three days later, it happened, the miracle that saved my marriage. To be clear, it changed my perspective, which changed my attitude, and that saved my marriage. I’d spent Tuesday helping a friend who had helped so much with our renovation. Returning home that afternoon, I almost missed my driveway. It wasn’t because I got lost in my thoughts or distracted by a squirrel. It was because I didn’t initially recognize my house. How could that be? Because those “weeds” had exploded into full bloom, every vine was covered with different shades of lavender. The petals were so thick that the previously detested greenery was barely visible now. Our home could have been floating on a floral cloud. The visual impact was way beyond “oh, those flowers are nice.”

The miracle didn’t stop there, though. Our supper – my wife, cooked, another bonus – was interrupted by a ringing doorbell. We hadn’t heard it since the obligatory testing after it was first installed, so we were startled. We speculated about who we’d find on the front porch, my guess was an insurance salesman, and she predicted Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were both wrong. It was an older lady who lived just down the road, a lady I’d known all of my life. Pointing at our surprise botanical display, she asked, “Where did you get these old-timey petunias.”

Now I knew what they were. “I don’t even know what a new-timey petunia is, but we didn’t get them anywhere. They just popped up. We thought they were weeds.” Two things I rarely resisted were the opportunities to be funny or right, and an opportunity was presenting itself for me to be both. I turned and yelled back into the house, “See? You wanted me to chop these down. You wanted me to murder these old-timey petunias.” Our visitor laughed when she heard my wife shout back, “Shut up!”

Over the next week, at least thirty cars stopped by for a closer look, and I became much more informed about old-timey petunias. I visited a couple of garden centers at big box stores and four or five local nurseries. That immersive experience was enough to show me why our front porch had become an impromptu garden expo. Petunias are ‘an annual’ anyway, flowers that bloom for a single season and then must be replaced the following year. I was finding genetically engineered plants with multi-colored blooms on the same plant, light purple and dark purple and white. Their vines were spindly compared to those around my porch, with maybe a fourth of the number of blossoms on each plant. In a world that has become increasingly disposable, old-timey petunias became an unfortunate casualty because annuals are a gardening disposable.

So, where did these old-timey petunias come from? That’s where the story becomes magical and miraculous. Petunias are annuals, but the old-timey ones are self-seeding annuals. With the right combination of conditions, those petunias could drop seeds this year to turn into another crop of petunias next year. That sounds perfectly reasonable, except we hadn’t planted petunias – old-timey or new-timey or any-timey – last year or ever.

When we purchased the property, the house was almost hidden by a border of azaleas that more closely resembled trees than bushes. They hadn’t been trimmed in many years. Some of them were at least eight feet tall. They were an azalea jungle, different varieties of different colors that bloomed at different times. Whoever was responsible for that azalea hodge-podge wasn’t aiming for landscape design, they were planting what they liked. What we learned from our historical research was remarkable. The azaleas had been planted by the home’s original owner, who had died twelve years before we bought it. And they had been there for at least ten years before she died, probably longer. Nothing except azaleas had grown from the dirt around that porch for at least 22 years and probably even longer.

When we moved in, there was no rescuing them even if we’d wanted to (and we didn’t). Wrapping a chain around the bases, the tractor attached to the other end of the chain uprooted them. When the azalea monsters lay defeated on their sides, I’d beat and shake their roots to reclaim as much dirt as possible for craters they’d left behind. Somewhere in all of that mix were seeds. Old-timey petunia seeds. 22-year-old (or more) old-timey petunia seeds.

Grasping the magnitude of the sum of those circumstances changed my life, literally. How many summer droughts or deep winter freezes did those seeds survive? How many times had it rained for hours or days and saturated the ground? What strength and resilience did they possess to survive over two decades of seasonal cycles, biding their time under a bunch of gaudy azaleas? They not only survived, though, but they also waited patiently for their chance to thrive one more time.

There had been a day when a farmer’s widow had dug holes and inserted petunia plants that would become glorious lavender clouds around her humble home. There had also been a day when that widow changed with the times, embracing that azaleas were now “in” and that her aging body would be better served by focusing on perennials instead of annuals. That widow had probably laid a guilt trip on her sons. They’d taken a Saturday off to ride with her to the nursery and loaded the back of a pickup truck with a catalog’s worth of azaleas. Then, those sons spent a spring afternoon getting blistered hands and sore backs by digging holes and planting azaleas. That widow never again needed to worry about planting this year’s petunias. The azalea canopy ensured that the seeds from last year couldn’t receive the necessary sunlight to sprout. The seeds were there, though, making their presence known again when the sunlight returned.

That was the perspective I needed. My marriage was like an old-timey petunia, a beautiful thing that hadn’t bloomed in too long. The seeds were there. Strong ones, resilient ones. They just needed light. I needed to wrap a chain around the selfishness and bitterness overtaking the porch and yank them out. I needed to invest some effort in fertilizing, watering, and weeding my wife’s emotional soil.

That’s how the weeds that almost finished my marriage ended up saving it.