Thriving – Not Just Surviving

I will say it again – plants are amazing.  In the summer of 2020 we had terrible storms.  Heavy rain and awful hail.  We got it worse than some people, but not as bad as many others.  On our patio, outside our kitchen window, is a tall planter.  That summer it had pink calibrachoa growing in it.  For anyone who doesn’t know, calibrachoa looks like miniature petunias.  They are also known as million bells.  They were lovely.  They were not, however, my first choice for that planter.  I ordered my plants from our local online garden centre and had ordered another colour.  When they arrived, I was disappointed that they were the wrong colour, but they were what I had, so I planted them.

Those little pink flowers grew and grew.  They spread so that the planter was full and gave a wonderful pop of colour every time I looked outside.

Then in June the first storm came.  There was heavy rain and hail.  The water poured down the street like a river covering our sidewalk, and the hail did its best to trash the early summer flowers, bouncing off of everything it hit.  And it did a good job.  I went outside after to survey the damage and things didn’t look good. Flowers were ripped off their stems, leaves had holes in them.  It was mid-June, so while I was heartbroken, I thought the flowers would likely come back.  Gardeners are eternal optimists, you know.  Especially where I live.  The weather here is very unpredictable and our growing season is short, so just the fact that every year we try again shows our true optimism. Those little pink flowers were trampled.  They just looked so sad.  But the sun came out, and slowly they started to perk up.

Eight days later, we had another bad storm.  More heavy rain, another river running in front of our house, and more hail trashing my flowers. This one was worse than the first.  Our patio looked more like a lake than a patio, and the river wasn’t just covering up our sidewalk.  It was covering half of the four lane road in front of our house.  The thunder and hail were loud, and it broke my heart watching what the hail was doing to the garden.  The little pink flowers were trampled again, and once again looked so very sad.  They were probably sorry to have come to live at our house.  But the sun came out and they perked up again.

About a month later we had another storm.  (It was an especially stormy year and this year was better.  Thank goodness!) This time the hail was big, and had odd bumps and spikes coming out of it.  It was very strange.  They looked, well, a little alien, to be honest.  And those bumps and spikes did a lot of damage.  My poor garden.  My babies.  But those little pink flowers came back again.  It was amazing.  They were tough and persistent.  As sad as it was watching them being pummeled, it was even more wonderful to watch them fight their way back.

They weren’t my first choice.  The colour was wrong – it didn’t go with my plan – but in the end they became one of my favourite flowers in the yard that year.  I wonder how hard we fight to come back when life doesn’t go according to plan and pushes us down.  Do we fight our way back and continue to grow? Or do we lay on the ground giving up and not able to take in the love we are being given and that we need to thrive? I’m sure we’ve all had moments of both.  But I like to think that when push comes to shove, most of us will fight our way back like those little pink flowers to face and enjoy the sun when it comes out.  We may need to rest for a while, but hopefully we will always get up to fight not only to survive, but to thrive.