The Things We Don’t Plant

There is a strip of dirt between my sidewalk and the street that I have never once thought of as a garden. It is where the mail truck pauses. Where the trash cans wait on Tuesday. Where the dog walkers let their dogs do what dog walkers let their dogs do. Nobody plants anything there. The ground is hard, the sun is merciless, and the whole patch mostly exists to be ignored.

And yet.

There it was one morning, blooming like it had every right to be. A zinnia. Hot pink, petals stacked and ruffled, standing straight up out of ground I gave up on years ago. I did not plant it. I am certain of that, because I do not plant things in the hellstrip.

(Yes, that is what gardeners actually call that strip. Hellstrip. Some folks say “tree lawn” or “the verge” or “the devil’s strip,” depending on where their people are from. But hellstrip is the one that stuck with me, for reasons that are about to become obvious.)

And it did not even come up alone. It is standing there in a little crowd of dandelions, which are their own kind of uninvited. Every spring those dandelions turn the ground gold, and every spring I tell myself this is the year I finally cut them and make jelly. You can, you know. You steep the petals like tea, strain them, and cook them down slow with sugar and lemon until it sets, and it comes out tasting like something close to honey. I have meant to do it for years. I think about it every single time I see them. And every year the yard guy rolls through before I get around to it, the mower takes that whole gold field down to plain green, and that is that until next spring.

So where on earth did it come from?

A short and slightly miraculous lesson in zinnias

Here is the thing about zinnias. They are annuals. That means they are built for one season and one season only. They sprout, they bloom their hearts out, they go to seed, and they die when the cold comes. They are not supposed to come back. That is the whole deal with annuals. You plant them on purpose, every single year, or you do not get them at all.

Except zinnias apparently did not read the contract.

What zinnias do, at the end of their short and showy lives, is fall apart in the most generous way possible. The flower heads dry out, go brittle, and crumble. And every one of those crumbling heads is packed with seed. Those seeds drop into the dirt, ride out the winter, and when the soil warms back up they wake up and start over. Gardeners have a word for a plant that shows up like this, unbidden and uninvited, growing where nobody put it. They call it a volunteer.

Down here, volunteers have it easy. Our winters are mild enough that zinnia seed can wait in the ground without freezing to death, then sprout the next time the dirt gets warm. So somewhere, sometime, a zinnia bloomed and died and scattered itself, and one of its seeds ended up in my hellstrip.

How it traveled there is the part I love. It could have been a bird. Goldfinches are wild for zinnia seed, and birds are not what you would call tidy eaters. They pull seed loose, drop half of it, and fly off with their breakfast, planting gardens they will never see. It could have been the wind. It could have hitched a ride in a clump of mulch or a shovelful of soil or a hard rain that ran down the street and pooled in exactly the wrong, or right, spot. Somebody, somewhere, grew a zinnia. And by some long and untraceable chain of small accidents, a piece of it came to rest in the one patch of ground on my whole property that I had written off completely.

What grows where you didn’t plant it

I have spent a lot of my life trying to plant things on purpose. Most of us have. We till the soil, we read the directions, we put the seed exactly where the package tells us to, and then we stand back and wait for the thing we worked for to come up. That is good and right. That is most of how a life gets built.
But every now and then something blooms that you did not earn and did not plan and could not have arranged if you tried. It just shows up. In the hardest ground. In the season you weren’t expecting it. In the very strip of dirt you decided long ago was a lost cause.

I think about that word. Hellstrip. The throwaway ground. The place between where you live and where you are going, the part nobody tends, the part everybody steps over on the way to somewhere better. And what came up out of mine was the brightest thing in the yard.

And here is what gets me. The dandelions, I keep meaning to tend. I have plans for them. Recipes, even. I look at them and see all the things I could do if I just got to it in time, and then I never quite do. But the zinnia asked nothing of me. It did not need my plans or my pectin or my good intentions. It just bloomed, on its own clock, in the gap I left untended, and it was lovelier than anything I have ever managed to put up in a jar.

I did not plant it. That is the whole point. The best things I have ever gotten were rarely the ones I planted. They were given. They volunteered. They came up out of dirt I had stopped believing in, and they bloomed anyway, hot pink and unbothered, as if to remind me that grace does not check whether the ground deserves it first.

There is an old story Jesus tells about a sower who goes out to scatter seed. Some of it falls on the path and the birds eat it. Some lands on rocky ground and springs up fast, then withers because it has no root. Some falls among thorns and gets choked out. And some falls on good soil and bears a harvest, thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. We usually hear that story and start sorting ourselves. Which kind of soil am I. Am I the good ground or the rocky patch. Am I ready to receive or am I too hard, too thorny, too far gone.

But lately I keep getting stuck on the sower himself, and how reckless he is with the seed. He does not measure out the good soil and ration the rest. He flings it everywhere, on the path, on the rocks, into the weeds, across ground no careful farmer would waste a handful on. He scatters like he has more than enough and does not mind where it lands. That is not efficient. That is generous to the point of foolishness. And every so often a seed catches somewhere nobody would have chosen, and it grows anyway.

And here is the part that stopped me cold. In the parable, the birds are the thieves. They are the ones who swoop down and snatch the seed off the path before it can ever take root. But the birds are exactly how my zinnia most likely got here. A goldfinch carried a seed it never meant to give, dropped it in the one strip of ground I had given up on, and flew off to its breakfast. What looks like loss in one telling turned out to be delivery in another. The seed got carried to the very place I would have called hopeless, and it bloomed there, in the hellstrip, gold finch and hot pink and all.

Maybe that is the thing about the seed we do not plant. It does not wait for us to prepare the good soil. It goes where it is carried, even by the things that look like they are taking it away, and it grows where it lands.

So I am leaving it right where it is. I am not moving it to a nicer bed or a prettier pot. It chose the hellstrip, and that feels like the most fitting place in the world for a thing like that to grow.

But it did get me thinking. If that patch of ground I gave up on can grow something this good without any help from me, what could it do if I actually paid attention to it?

Tending the throwaway ground

I have decided to stop ignoring it. Not pave over what showed up, but join in. I want to make that strip useful, and I have been turning over the options. Raised beds, maybe, low and tidy ones, so I could grow a few things on purpose. Or simpler than that, I could just lean into what the ground already told me it wanted to be: a pollinator strip. Zinnias and cosmos and black-eyed Susans and coneflower, the tough, sun-loving, heat-shrugging kind of flowers that can take the warmth coming off the pavement and mostly run themselves. A patch that feeds the bees and the goldfinches and hands me flowers to cut for the table, all while reseeding itself the way this whole thing started.

I am doing my homework first, of course. There are rules about what you can put in that strip of ground, and you always call before you dig so you do not put a shovel through something that matters. I know to check the boxes before I build. But once I do, that lost cause of a patch is getting promoted from ground I step over to ground I tend.

Keeping the cycle going

And the zinnia that started all this? I am saving its seed.

It is almost embarrassingly easy. You do not cut the flower while it is pretty. You let that bloom finish, fade, and dry all the way out on the plant until the head is brown and papery and crisp. The uglier it gets, the more ready it is. Then you crumble the dried head apart with your fingers and look for the little flat arrowhead shapes at the base of each spent petal. Those darts are the seeds. You let them dry out a few more days somewhere airy, then tuck them into a paper envelope, never plastic, so any leftover moisture wicks away instead of turning to mold. Label it with the date, set it somewhere cool and dark, and wait for spring.

Here is the part I love most, and the part that feels truest to how all of this began. I do not have to choose between saving the seed and letting it volunteer. I can do both. I will collect a little seed as insurance, an envelope in the drawer for the year nature forgets. And I will also let a few heads dry and drop right where they stand, so the patch keeps reseeding itself the way it found me, with no help required.

That zinnia showed up uninvited, in the ground I had written off, and bloomed anyway. The least I can do now is keep the cycle going. Save a little of what was given. Scatter the rest back where it came from. And finally tend the throwaway ground that has been quietly trying to grow something beautiful all along, with or without me.

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”
Matthew 13:3-9, NRSV