Oh Hail!

There’s grace in green things.  Under the most cruel conditions, drought or deluge, they try pretty darn hard to keep growing.  And that’s a lesson for me.  June 15th at about a quarter to five in the afternoon, I watched a hail storm of biblical proportions wipe out my vegetable garden and do serious damage to my ornamentals.  In a matter of twenty minutes, the kitchen garden I’ve been cultivating since last fall, was sealed beneath four inches of marble-sized hail.  Where my beets were planted, the surface bled purple.  My frantic attempts to dig out all the baby lettuces, and junior carrots and chard were quickly abandoned when I realized my produce had been reduced to mush.  Line up the Gerber jars.  I stood in my driveway and bawled.  Six hydrangeas across the front of the porch, who were just teasing me that morning with some early blossoms, looked as if a swarm of locust had come through.  In many places at the crowns of these mature shrubs, only the center vein of each leaf was left.  The hail was so large, and so jagged, and lasted so long, that around each viburnum and spirea, clump of plox and Gaillardia, a pile of green confetti had collected.  My lush garden reduced to shreds.  Literally.

As my sister has said, my plants are my babies.  I know each one.  In that silly, anthropomorphic way of nurturers, I address each flower and shrub and tree as if it has sentience.  Certainly each has personality–some are generous and others stubborn.  So I was only mildly surprised when within a week, my babies were pushing new growth out every pore.  To look at them is to see battered, sere blades and stalks, but look more carefully, lift a shattered leaf or two, and there!  A new bit of growth, and effort at reclaiming itself.  Without enough green matter, my babies will starve, so they grow to replace the lost foliage.  How often is that my response to a dashing? 

This morning I noticed that my pink phlox are about to bloom, even though none of them has more than a leaf or two left from the hail storm.  Blooming is the beginning of reproduction.  Maybe they are giving their all to leave behind a genetic legacy.  To support them I’ve been ladling cups of organic fertilizer tea onto their root crowns.  I’d hate to see my flowers bloom in a kind of self-sacrificial death scene. 

Last night I planted another round of lettuces.  I think the carrots will make it and maybe the beets, although their shredded red flag leaves have a lot of work to do first.  I bought strawberries from the valley the other day, giving up on the now brown beads that should have been a bumper crop.  So, I guess I’m suffering little from that bizarre storm left over from last winter; at least my suffering isn’t material.  I will surely miss my voluptuous garden this summer.  But I’ll love what I got.

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