my checkered lily

I have been thinking about a perennial  shade garden I used to own  .  and lovingly tend. This garden was deeply shaded and it took a lot of attention to have something blooming through the short, blooming season of Minnesota. My garden goal was to have something flowering at all times. I gradually learned that even in deep Minnesota winter, I could get snow drops, a hardy, tiny bulb plant, to flower in deep midwinter.

My immediate neighbors and I had a gentle competition to see who could get the first bloom to rise up above the snow crust. There are some bulbs that you can plant to get very early blooms. One of them is called snow drops. Amazingly, while most of the ground is covered in a few feet of snow, little patches of ground will melt, patches of earth will emerge right in the midst of deep winter and out will pop a tiny white flower, a snow drop.

All of us had snow drops planted throughout our yards. And we all patrolled, looking for the first snow drop to appear. When one of us found our first one, we would rush to the neighbors and have them come look. We were all always happy for each other.

After snow drops, come crocus.

And then, sometimes even before the crocus, there are some daffodils that will come up earlier than others. Right up through frost cover.

All of us on my street patrolled the garden stores looking for early bulbs.

I found two that Ty, my next door neighbor who, with his partner, once won a city-wide award from Minneapolis for his outstanding garden, had never heard of. I cannot tell you what a coup it was to find an early-blooming bulb that Ty did not know about.

I found something called a shooting star. It sometimes emerged before the snow drops. It started out looking like as a very small white flower. One might even think "oh, there's a snow drop" and then, it would shoot to about a foot long in a day or two, with the small, five-pointed star, white flower at the end. My shooting star did not come up every year that I lived in this house but when it did, it was spectacular. The way it shot up tall in a seemingly instant way was thrilling. And the fact that this cold happen when it was below zero cold still astounds me.

I also found something called a checkered lily. The checkered lily is absolutely amazing.  I found her at a garden shop, in a section for wild plants. Wild plants meant the plants on sale had been harvested in the wild.  This is not really good gardening. One should forage for wild plants out in the wild, not head on down to a garden shop.

My checkered lily was a bulb plant that usually broke through the winter frost during the January thaw in Minnesota. The checkered lily only bloomed a few days. If I had not patrolled my garden daily, I could have easily missed it.

The petals of that checkered lily looked checkered, like a checkerboard only in pale brown and pale pink tones. How did nature end up with those square checkers of color on a teeny tiny bulb that only bloomed briefly in bleak midwinter?

In order to keep that checkered lily thriving, I had to let it die back naturally, which was easy enough.

I learned one of my most important lessons in loving, however, when I learned that as the checkered lily died back and I exercised self restraint, resisting the urge to pull out its dead lines to make room for other plants, I had to sit back and do nothing. I had to let that plant live out its path.

Then, however, once the checkered lily had completely died back, other plants overcrowded it.

I learned to tenderly prune back the surrounding flower plants, learned to hold that tiny space for my checkered lily, for its future blooms.

I came to love imagining the plant, underground all year, waiting for its few days of gobsmacking beauty.

When I sold that house and moved away, I gifted my checkered lily to the guys next door.  they had loved it as much as I and we had no idea if the new owners would care about one tiny plant.

The new owners ripped out my entire shade garden and planted a boring, suburban-y front garden of srhugs and grass.

Not me. It had been a tiny garden, underneath a 100+ year old elm tree, which has since died and been cut down. With the elm tree gone, my shade garden would not have thrived. A shade garden is a different animal from a full sun garden.

But those new owners appeared to have no appreciation for the admittedly subtle efforts of a deep shade garden, no patience for the many briefly flowering bulbs I was constantly searching for and then tending.

I had lots of bulbs. But my favorte was, and remains, that checkered lily.