Late Bloomers

I'll be honest: I don't have a green thumb. Whatever finds its way into our yard usually does so without my help.

In the spring, however, I decided to add some color to our front yard. We have a little circle garden out there, but it offers nothing more than green during the spring and I wanted something to match the riot of colors I saw in other people's gardens. So I fell back on an old favorite from years past: cosmos.

Face it, there could hardly be a better flower for me to plant. For one thing, look at its name! Could cosmos be any more appropriate for a writer of science fiction? For another thing, they're easy and hardy, just the thing for someone like me. So I bought a little packet of seeds and carefully planted them in the bare spots of the circle.

Of course, Mother Nature always needs some amusement, so she promptly sent torrential rains to Southeast Kansas. It poured and poured. It was with some sadness that I watched the little garden get flooded. I knew my cosmos seeds had washed away and various complications prevented me from trying again. So the garden remained simply green.

But our little garden has a secret: it's a fall garden. You can laugh at it all you want during the spring and summer, but then in mid-September, a patch of pale pink appears. Then another. Then another. Before long, there's a big fuzzy group of sedum showing the world what a little garden can do. And the butterflies love it! I walk through a virtual cloud of them each time I mow out front. It's kind of fun to crouch down and examine all the little butterflies, moths, bees and unidentified bugs feasting on the blossoms.

And this year, there was a bonus: just last week, I noticed an out-of-place patch of magenta among the pink. Puzzled, I went to investigate ... and I discovered a little group of cosmos rising up toward the sky, some of them already blooming. I don't know how they survived but they did. I guess they just wanted to join their sedum friends in showing the world that late bloomers can be pretty special.

Which really makes me happy. Not only because I get a reminder that it's not winter yet, not by a long shot, but also because I get to reflect that not everything happens early. I wasn't exactly young when I published my first novel, but that's okay.
Sometimes it just takes time to get it right.

Have a beautiful autumn.



Sedum and Cosmos, September 2014