Every Color But Blue: Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

Every Color But Blue:  Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Plant zinnias.”

            That’s what I told the unhappy woman.  Then I got into my car and drove off into the twilight, lips blue with shock.  How had it happened?

I had just given advice.

            I don’t give advice!  Certainly not the horticultural variety, on the principle that nobody would take it.  Why should they?  Virtually nothing you find in newspaper gardening sections these days is useful, entertaining or, not to put too fine a point on it, true. 

You get the idea the editor says, “So write 700 words on petunias,” and the writer says, “So what’s a petunia?”  And the editor says, “So I look like I know what’s a petunia?  But if it’s something you eat run a recipe.”

In such an environment if I choose to squander my allotted column-inches on beer, Shakespeare and the human condition, I figure I am anyway doing no harm.  But back to those zinnias.

I had recommended them not horticulturally but medicinally.  The woman seemed depressed, and I had given her a suggestion on how to be happier.

Me?

Though I claim no expertise in either field, it could be argued I know more about horticulture than happiness.  You might go so far as to say I know more about Mesolithic marsupials (if any existed).  Not to beat it to death, but I am not just a  “The glass is half empty” type, I am a “The glass has been sucked into the yawning abyss of my despair” type.

But as detailed in one of the “Boblets” I have begun posting on the Bob’s Little Acre blog, during a recent period of intense misery I read a self-help manual on happiness, drank the Kool-Aid,  and have since been earnestly trying to mend my Black Hole ways. 
Resolutions and mantras sift from my desk and dangle off my bulletin board. (“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”) (“Be nice to people.  Mostly.”)  I march through life with a determined smile, militantly searching for the good in others.  I’ll shake it out of them if I have to.

For my cell phone ring tone I selected “Nature,” which sounds like the cinematic effect you’d hear when the fairy godmother descends in a soap bubble to wave her wand.  Birds chirp.  Chimes tinkle.  My husband says all that’s missing is a high, piping voice announcing, “Somebody’s callin’ to say they love you!”

            And the odd thing is, I really have been happy.  Like last Sunday I worked like a field hand from the minute I woke up until past midnight, weeding flowerbeds, mowing my continent-like lawn, canning 12 quarts of tomatoes. 

At the end of the day I was covered with sweat, dirt and grass.  I’d scalded all 10 fingers and gotten poison ivy between the left ones.  But as I crawled into bed, too exhausted to read, I thought: “It don’t get no better than this, Earl.” 

What’s my secret?  Well, all right.  Beer may have played some tiny role.  I have never made any secret that to mow the lawn you need more yellow fluids than gasoline.  But that’s not really it.  I’m at a level of bubbly that can’t be accounted for by malt fermentation. 

You might postulate it’s because summer is my season by birthright; I was born in August and, FYI, I’ll be blowing out some candles this week.

But way too many!  Past, say, 40, birthdays seriously suck.  Why celebrate a process that makes our butt sag, our belly billow and hair grow out of our rapidly multiplying chins?  You might as well dedicate a holiday to methamphetamine, or leprosy.

            So probably I should be depressed by this reminder that my brief hour of youth and beauty, such as it was, has dwindled further into the murky past.  Instead, I’ve been so perky lately I’ve wondered:  Is there still time to try out for cheerleading? 

Is my sunny mood owing to the self-help book? the mantras?  the ring tone?  Maybe a little.  But I think what really does the trick is:

            Flowers.

            Ten years ago I bought a rose of Sharon with big double purple blooms.   Shortly afterwards, I discovered how to root out new plants from cuttings and thus began my Mad Scientist phase.   Alternately speaking in a Royal-Society accent (“May I take a cutting, sir, for purposes of vegetative propagation?”) or a Dr. Frankenstein one (“Ve make der big vuns into der little vuns, but vurst ve have to cut zem op.  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!”) I proceeded to cover every bare spot with rose of Sharon clones. 

So now, every August I’m surrounded by oceans of big double flowers, to the point that struggle as I might I float helplessly off in a tide of horticultural bliss.  For persons of a botanical bent, no case of the blues can withstand that amount of purple.

But even if you were not sensible enough to go postal years ago with scissors and rooting hormone, it’s not too late to perk yourself up with flowers.  I have planted zinnias on my birthday several years and seen them bloom before frost.

Zinnias are round, double and easy to grow.  Their colloquial name is Old Maids but they always remind me of those tall, cheerful country girls who wear a lot of makeup and marry early and often.  A seed packet will run you maybe a quarter and keep you the rest of your life, as they self-seed relentlessly.

Zinnias come tall or as dwarves and, significantly, in every color but blue.  

So if August finds you, like me, with your personal life in tatters, your professional life a shambles and your fingers swollen with poison ivy, flowers help!  So I feel impelled to tell you:

“Plant zinnias.”

             Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.