Oftentimes, as I read through the various plant forums, i encounter letters from new hybridizers. After doing their homework, making a plan and racheting up their expectations, the much awaited blooms arrive. Some of those blooms are a sobering moment. The color isn't there. There are no real distinguishing characteristics that make the resulting blooms different enough to warrant being registered. Worse yet...ewwww, a pure white bloom. More often than not, the novice hybridizer says, "It just came out...white!" - as if this adds to the crash and burn. If you see something of yourself and your experience in this, take heart. We have a few insights into the situation that just might alleviate your angst.

The Little Garden That Could...

It is said that a garden, like a mirror, reflects more than it's owner's face. The experienced viewer sees more than a mere landscape thriving in dappled sunlight or tolerating a pounding rain. Among the living colors, winding tendrils and the fleshy, new growth coming from bulbs and tubers, there are dead things too. Those dead things are relics of unchangeable misfortune, miscalculation or simply a natural end of life. A good garden keeps what is dead and invites it's newer members to use those deaths in marvelous and creative new ways.

Misfortune forms a garden's mystical archeology and defines it's bones.