Hope

Some very small shoots of green gave me a ridiculous amount of joy this morning and restored my faith in the small daily miracles we call life.

Bear with me if you can, though I fully appreciate that while the following tale is of considerable interest to me, most other folks won’t give a hoot!

Because of a series of accidents of time… nature… history… I’m not overly blessed in the family department (Oscar Wilde would probably call me very careless indeed), but what I haven’t got in quantity is more than made up for by the quality. I consider myself blessed to have two cousins in Dublin who are two of the nicest women anyone could ever hope to meet. Last Christmas, these two put their heads together to decide what might make a nice present for the cousin in Spain and came up with something brilliant. They “put a little money behind the counter” (a very Irish one that) at my favourite garden centre and instructed me to go indulge in a little horticultural colour to remember them by.

I had a very happy time selecting various things, like a new lemon tree for the side patio and a fine hydrangea for a corner that was crying out for one out back. But probably by far my favourite acquisition was a fairly mature Flame Vine that in January was in its fullest glory and in the future would look spectacular against our white walls and winter-blue sky. It was to cover a bleak boundary fence and I got some Black-Eyed Susan vines as well to go through it, so that when one flowering finished, the other would begin, giving a vivid splash of colour (and privacy) for most of the year.

Through entirely my own stupid fault, the actually planting of the vine was delayed and where I had left it became flooded. Now Flame Vines are pretty tough things (and are notoriously hard to get rid of where they become invasive), but they really don’t like being waterlogged and by the time I’d noticed the problem, my lovely vine was dying… Despite my best efforts at replanting and nurturing it, within a few weeks it was, to all appearances, completely dead. Anticipations of orange-flowered splendour for Christmases to come were dashed.

I decided not to uproot it, but tried what I’d seen all my Spanish neighbours do without a second thought whenever their plants are in trouble: I cut it all down - viciously! - to maybe an inch or two above the ground and left it (just giving it an occasional splash of water when I watered things nearby).

For months now, nothing has happened with my lovely vine and I was finally giving up on the dream when this very morning I noticed something truly miraculous, the dry brown nubs that looked so dead are sprouting tiny, tiny shoots of green!

I did photograph my little miracles, but while I was beyond excited about them, looking back at my efforts I can’t quite imagine anyone else being quite so moved by some tiny, furled-up, specks of green on a knobbly, dried-up, brown stub (maybe in a week or so when they have come to something - fingers crossed! - I’ll try again). But while I was snapping my little scraps of hope, I was surrounded by a cloud of very, very small, brownish, dull-looking butterflies. One landed on a nearby geranium and I managed a pretty tight zoom in on it and up close I don’t think it’s so dull at all. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get anything in shot to give a sense of scale, but that’s a fairly wee geranium leaf that butterfly is sitting on!

Anyway, here’s a very wee butterfly on the day my hope for a colourful winter garden to remember my very special cousins by came back to life!

(If you bothered reading all this, thanks for sticking with me!)