Morning Thanks--the little climber

I wish I were a little more responsible when it comes to plants out back.  I mean, it's a fault I could work at if I was younger I than I am, a response ("if I were younger") which I make often these days and may well be just another way of forsaking duty still very much my own. Rather than the most important distinction--is this little beauty a one-season-er or can I plan on its return every spring?--I don't give a rip about its name or genus or species. What I care about is what's on the outside--to wit, how is it going to pretty up the backyard? That seems awfully vain of me, don't you think? There's something inherently sinful about regarding only outside appearances. I honestly don't bother about names; I just pick up the pretties. 

Including the climbers. We've got a wonderful stony retaining wall running on both sides of our backyard. I made it--just about the only thing about this place in the country that I constructed--not the rocks, of course; they took millions of years, but the wall itself--think Robert Frost maybe. 

Several years ago, I bought a darling little climber from the plant store, not because I knew a thing about its identity, but because the idea of some climbing plant inching its way up the stone walls, a vine-like creation--sounded perfectly beautiful--no, let me change that, "looked" perfectly beautiful in the magic garden my imagination creates every April. Bought it--complete with its own little ladder to remind itself of what it is and why it does what it does--planted it (following directions) then waited for it to begin to fulfill the promises it had registered in my mind.

Let's just say whatever arose from the good Iowa soil was pitiful, not worth mentioning. The plant itself did make clear in packaging that it was a perennial, but it's first year's show was so meager that whether or not it cared to show its face the second spring, to me, completely was to me a decision it along would make. (Meanwhile, I bought a cheap little trellis, more for the birds than that little climber.

What happened? Nothing. Perfectly nothing. Meanwhile the bushes my wife had chosen were prospering with such abundance that whatever it was I'd planted, that little oh-so-cute climber, for instance, simply lost their standing, which is a nice way of saying, I suppose, that they lost their  square corner of creation. 

Last year, amazingly, that little climber inched up healthily, as if out of nowhere, but, once again lost its standing when the bushes beside it just shouldered it out of the way. By September, I thought it was gone until I started cleaning up and realized that what it had eventually spun out was quite considerable--but definitely overshadowed by the healthy perennial bushes all around.

And now's the time to look back at that picture at the top of the page because that's our unnamed climbing plant, purchased as many as a half-dozen years ago, but this spring off to the kind of start any major leaguer would be happy about, already climbing the old rickety trellis I stuck when I actually had dreams for what that climber could do or be. 

Now rather than create the sermon out of all of this, I'll let you fellow Calvinists write your own, although in this case the sermon writes itself, and does so beautifully too, even if I can't name the climber, because this year the climber is going to establish a presence, a standing. Who knows how it'll flower?--or if it will at all. Who knows, I may just put my phone to work and find out who it is. 

The climber deserves a name.

End of sermon.