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| People laugh at gardeners and raz them for their failures, until the bees, butterflies, and birds show up to say "Thankyou." |
The trouble with a sunny patch of land is the way weeds take hold of it and possess it with demonic ferocity. Crab grass can grow several feet high and make thousands of seeds, because it was brought over as a grain to be harvested. Tough orchard grass can grow even better - ugly and tough to dig.
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| Wild Ginger- Hidden Lily is as fickle as the weather. |
The Butterfly Garden was once a plot of roses from a rainbow roses sale. We knew Mrs. Wright would love them, just as Mrs. Gardener did on the other side. However, they were hard to see and manage because that side of the house has no windows and no path from the backyard to the front. Mrs. Ichabod said, "Move them under the maple tree!" I pleaded that maple tree roots were a menace to muscles, patience, and emotional stability. Mushroom compost had been added to the area, so I bought some tools and flailed away at the maple tree area. That turned out well in spite of warning in all gardening books about planting under a greedy maple tree. Our neighbor did plastic surgery on it, shaping the tree to be more of an elm, with a lot less shade.
So I decided to make the extra rose area a straw-bale garden. I stacked up the bales, added water, planted strawberries, and watched slugs ravage everything like a team of Planned Giving Counselors. I put out beer bowls to capture them and found that some animal had enjoyed the beer and dead slugs overnight. I tried to get that out of my mind but there it is again.
So the sunny area had years of organic matter thrown on it - wood mulch, newspapers, straw bales. I was going to make a forest of hidden lilies. They grow like crazy, have strange flowers, but also fail to appear after a tough winter.
I even worked out an area just for butterfly plants, and the lawn crew weed-whacked the effort into oblivion (my fault for not putting up warnings). So I planted, fenced, and guarded two Joe Pye Weeds, one Yarrow, one Comfrey, and one Chaste Tree. They did well.
Yesterday - Rewards
I had a few Bee Balm bargain roots to plant. I was ready to grit my teeth, grind my molars, and dig into tough soil. Instead, the first shovel's worth was as soft and rich as the topsoil in Illinois, where buffalo processed prairie grass for centuries and developed topsoil measured in yards rather than feet.
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| Joe Pye Weed |
Most of my labor had been in vain, it seemed to me. But all that time, God's Creation was at work through the creatures of the air and soil. Wood mulch, newspapers, and crab grass were digested and turned into soft earth. Birds took Yarrow seed and planted two more tall butterfly plants in the Rose Garden. The Joe Pyes will be nine feet tall and mix a musty aroma with vanilla when the butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds stop by.
That is the way congregations used to work. The pastor was called by a few people to start a congregation. He stayed there and worked, like Schwan working decades in Cleveland as a pastor, district president, and synod president. The labor is long but the rewards come from the effective Word in the Means of Grace, not from gimmicks and fads promised by the uncertain and insincere.
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| Objective Justification merges the Atonement with Justification and confuses both at the same time. |
