I’m still planting things in mid-July, so you can tell that I’m not a efficient gardener. Let’s just say that plants run screaming to the other side of the nursery and fling mulch over their heads when they see me coming.
Instead of a green thumb, I have a black thumb. But I love plants, and I really want to know more about gardening, so I’ve been reading a little about growing things.
Recently I read an article about aucubas. I think we have one in our yard, sort of a shrub with yellow spots on the leaves. Of course, most of my plants have yellow spots on their leaves. Anyway, the writer said if I wanted my aucuba to have berries, I had to plant a male and a female aucuba.
When a friend gave me a dogwood several years ago, he told me the same thing, something about needing “a male” in the vicinity so that the tree would produce flowers.
Well, there’s my husband, and our male chihuahua Buddy, and the UPS man comes up our road. I figured that ought to be enough males, if things like that really mattered to a tree.
I forgot about it. I dealt with the dogwood as I do all plants: I dug a hole, put the tree in, poured in water, covered up the hole and commanded “Grow!” If I had wanted to meet somebody’s social needs, I would have adopted a teenager instead of a dogwood.
The dogwood died last year, unmated, and we cut it down.
But I’m trying to get my head around this information. There are male and female plants? Plants have sex?
My first question is how do you know which is which? What do you look for to tell which is the boy and which is the girl?
I know how to tell on a dog. But a petunia? Where’s the...you know...the “tell-tale sign”? I am not feeling up a petunia.
Knowing what my plants are doing out there opens up a whole new view of plant life, and I’m not sure I like what I see!
I now realize that instead of just concentrating on growing, they’re out there flapping their fronds around and shaking their plumes at each other and dropping blossoms in plain sight. They aren’t blooming, they’re just trying to get noticed. Shame on you, you floozy ferns!
Obviously, these are not Southern Baptist plants. A Southern Baptist plant practices True Love Waits. A Southern Baptist lily keeps a nice, fat hymnal between herself and that leering hosta hanging over the flower bed.
Yet there’s illicit propagating going on in my yard, because despite my ineptitude at even keeping plants alive, an occasional bloom or berry still shows up on one of my plants.
Can’t you just imagine what the poor plant parents are going through when they see their children ruining their lives this way?
“You what??” screams Mama Holly when Miss Holly gives her the news that berries are on the way. “You propagated? Are you telling me you PROPAGATED? With some weed that just popped up in the yard? Is this the way we raised you to behave? What will the neighbors think?
Then Mama has another horrifying thought. “Apparently he didn’t use protection! What if he’s given you aphids? What if you got blight or black spot? Oohhh!”
Mama flings herself down on the ground at this point, her branches drooping pitifully.
When Papa Holly gets the news, he is equally furious.
“You made berries with that upstart?” Just how is he planning to support you and a bunch of little berries? Does he know how much it costs to raise berries these days? No, I guess that young whipper-snapdragon just thinks we’ll be good grandparents and step in to foot all the bills for fertilizer and compost and mulch. Well, he’s got another think coming!”
Papa has to gulp down a big slug of Miracle-Gro to steady himself.
But no matter what Mama and Papa think, and despite the leaves Miss Holly puts on to hide them, soon little berries begin to pop out.
I can just hear the garden chatter now:
“Hmph. We’re not all as lily white as we would have other plants believe, are we?” sniffs the day lily.
“Obviously, that sex education the little bedding plants get in the nursery isn’t doing them a lot of good,” sneers Crepe Myrtle.
“Mama, how do little berries get here?” asks a young pyracantha, clinging to his trellis.
“Ask your father,” snaps his flustered mother.
“And you, you keep your trunk zipped!” commands the oak tree to his own spindly son a few yards across the way.
Despite the social uproar it causes in our plant community, we must continue to have little berries and blooms born to keep our gardens going and growing.
So if you see me at the nursery fondling some plant’s foliage, you’ll know I’m just looking for males and females, plotting a little romantic intrigue among the begonias and hoping for a really happy, colorful yard this summer. Eventually.
