I've Been Thinking A Lot About Snapdragons
- Deborah Llewellyn
- 23 hours ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 9 minutes ago
A gardener with a birthday in May is blessed with a bounty of daily gifts. The fickle weather of March and April behind, the month of May is the time that fresh perennial leaves ease their passage from the earth. It fascinates me that plants of the same species emerge from the soil on the same day. Wishing I had tagged them, trying to remember if this rebirth is a coneflower, aster, or Rudbeckia? It’s hard to leave the garden, for missed opportunity.
I was dazzled to see my River Birch and Chinese Maple burst into limelight leaves almost overnight. Amazed to see that one sunny primrose I purchased in the fall, after it had bloomed, surprised me with a mass of pale pink flowers with yellow centers, spilling across the brick patio like ocean waves.
So, each morning, coffee cup in hand, I inspect seven zones in my very small, secluded garden, a micro-world I designed, planted, and nurture.
As I walk, I think about color and texture and consider new varieties of pollinators that I might add. I bend and stretch to pluck weeds and cutback unruly branches. I judge whether plants are receiving the right amount of sun or need to be moved. I pause to appreciate those given to me by family and friends.
I take photos; they are as familiar as family. In the garden I find myself thinking about life quandaries and find answers to the deepest questions. Here, I am alone and serene in a verdant temple.
Why do I spend so many hours gardening from early spring to late fall? Why do I bemoan the winter days, worried about which ones will manage the cold? What shall I add next spring? What’s the best time to plant seeds? In asking these questions, I realize many benefits I receive from my passion for gardening.
I Create Art in My Garden
Planting a garden is like painting a picture. I watch how color carries my eye from one area to the next. “Ah, another blue salvia, would be great over there!” "The Blue Guardian delphinium will be perfect color match for the agapanthus." The texture of leaves and shapes of trees provide hours of fascination.
In the mornings I stand and slowly turn, absorbing the shapes and colors, then dash off to get a shovel and move something or off to the nursery to buy what’s needed for balance and visual thrill I wish to achieve.
I have nine artistic friends who meet quarterly to share our projects and creative ideas. Two of us come with drawings and photos of our gardens. No one questions that gardening is our creative canvas.
Gardening Strengthens My Body and Soothes My Mind
Gardening provides exercise without my realizing I am having a workout. I dig in the dirt, clip unruly plants, and pull weeds for hours, surprised when I notice the passage of time. I like to sketch plants and add colored pencil or water color. In doing so, I notice plant structures, their likeness and differences, the miracle of evolution.
By drawing plants and keeping notes on my garden, I am providing evidence that I once lived, had some thoughts, and add beauty to my neighborhood. As I water plants, I breathe in their scents and watch the rainbow formed with a spray of water. The pot of gold, of course, is the thankful flower. Gardening is teaching me to examine life with a magnifier, a form of mediation.
Gardening is a Legacy -a Way to Honor and Connect With the Past
How appropriate that a lineage of ancestors is drawn as a tree. I could also draw a friendship tree, each branch carrying me to the past through plants I received from friends. I took them along with the furniture the two times that we moved. When I look at them, I remember who gave them to me, and think about why this matters. Forty years ago, my mother brought me a large pot filled with Hostas and a Cinnamon Stick fern for my patio in Durham. She told me that she did this so there would be something beautiful greeting me each summer when I returned home from overseas.
When we moved to Beaufort n 2003, I brought along that Cinnamon Fern and planted it in the area where I enjoyed reading in the afternoon. When we moved again in 2022, the fern came with us. It makes me realize that my green thumb came from my mother and the array of ways she said, “I love you, daughter.”
In spring, my mom and I made an annual ritual to visit every greenhouse in her county, and then off to her relatives with gardens. Gardening became a language of love and connection. As a tiny child I followed my mom through my great- grandmother Sara Byrd Norris’s garden as she pointed out each flowering “bush.” Granny Norris wore a floppy, flour-sack bonnet and long sleeves to keep the roses from scratching her. As a child, I thought she was a bit mean and scary, but in her garden she glowed with sweetness.
Gardening Nurtures Social Connection and an Active Mind
As I learn more about plants from my friends, as well as the Google search engine, my curiosity is energized. When my gardening friends suggest exploring a new nursery, we plan a day of it. We exchange plants. We gift each other plants. We learn about each other’s personalities by noting the differences in how our gardens are planted, each speaking to preferences. Strangers on my street stop and chat with me about my garden, and sometimes theses strangers become friends.
Our town has a garden club with nearly 200 members. Thankfully, all wearing nametags at the monthly meeting. Through these gardening conversations, I continue to learn and have expanded my friendship circle.
As I age, I plant more perennials, so that they return to me each year, as old friends, when I have limited physical ability to tend the garden.
After twenty-three years as a member of the garden club, I am now considered a life-time member, which comes with some perks and notoriety.
I note the many ways that the garden club honors life-time members when they die. An obituary is sent to the two hundred members. A spectacular hydrangea is planted on the grounds of the Beaufort Historical Association and tagged with the member’s name. Members gather by the plant and share happy memories about the member who passed. This ritual is conducted each year just before our popular spring garden walk. On that day we tour ten gardens of our members.
This year my garden is one selected for the Beaufort Old Homes and Garden weekend, along with gardens of my friends, Elizabeth and Heidi.
Through Gardening I Find My Power to Save the Earth
Over the past five years, I’ve been learning about pollinator gardens. I now purchase native plants for their essential role in the survival of butterflies and bees, so critical to plant pollination and life on earth. Once I realized the way I could help save the earth through my garden, I began to study endangered butterflies indigenous to my area, and the host plants they require for survival. Most of my plant purchases go for these plants.
I began to keep records of butterflies in my garden and gained evidence that butterflies come to my garden because I provide them with their host plant. I can now watch Gulf Fritillaries in a mating dance by my passion vine. Buckeyes lay eggs on my snapdragons; monarchs flock to my milkweed and swallowtails to my fennel, parsley, carrots, and dill.
My jaw dropped when I spotted a snowberry clearwing butterfly moth on my Leo Honeysuckle, its host plant. With my new patch of primrose, I am standing guard for the arrival of the pink and yellow primrose moth.
Butterflies and moths take nectar from many flowers but the host plant provides them with survival. Here they lay their eggs on the only leaves the hatching caterpillar of a certain species can eat to form a chrysalis, hatch into a butterfly, and complete their life cycle.
I was super excited to realize from biologist Doug Tallamy’s lectures and books that, no matter the size of the garden, a pollinator plant makes a big difference. If we encourage our neighbors and town to plant pollinator gardens, we can create habitat corridors for butterflies and bees to travel from one garden to the next.
Doug Tallamy says, by doing so, we will be building a home grown national park. I am joyful and exuberant when new butterflies, such as yesterday’s Red Admiral (host plant dead nettle). I am pleased to join with other gardeners for greater impact. Supporting the life cycle of butterflies and moths provides me with important ingredients for aging well.
Gardening Revitalizes Me as I Age and Ponder Life’s Big Questions
As I garden, I think about life—the big questions. I am alone in my thoughts, and I work through things as I pluck weeds and water on dry days. I write these thoughts in my gardening journal, and other times I let these private thoughts settle where they are, just between me and a plant. This year, I was thinking a lot about snapdragons, my favorite spring flower.
I realize the quandary I face with snapdragons is also my dilemma about getting old and seeking rejuvenation. A few times during the growing season, I write a poem in quiet reverie on the subject of gardening and life. The poetry comes to me while I work, and unfolds as I scrub the dirt from my fingernails. I quickly grab a scrap of paper as words flow from my fingers. And so it was, that my thoughts about snapdragons and my upcoming birthday grew into a poem.
I am ever thankful to my garden for bringing meaning to my life.
I’ve Been Thinking a lot about Snapdragons
I’ve been thinking a lot about snapdragons.
A life-dilemma, like my birthday and passing years.
It’s presumption to think they bloom in May for me
and as protection for my children, both born in May,
from a mythical child-snatcher in German lore, a small gray water dweller,
who switches beautiful babies like mine for his own,
unless they are protected by snapdragons.
Long ago, a day in May, a patch of snapdragons bid me to take notice.
Standing tall in the sun—radiant white, yellow, orange and red—just outside the garden’s
canopy of trees where we went
to buy bent-willow chairs for our brick-tiled porch
In our first home on a hill covered with ivy.
Me, resplendent, with bulging womb,
days before delivery of so much promise.
And so it is that I am driven to plant snapdragons in the fall
like an infant seeded nine months before.
Challenging to find in the fall,
seedlings sometimes appear like a surprise
between trays of pansies and violas sold to color a gray winter
on every front porch in my walk-about-town.
Pansies hold no lure; I covet the snapdragon.
One year I missed their brief appearance in the fall and bemoaned to a friend
who delivered me a box of tiny flowers with dragon mouths and thoughts of spring.
If I plant in the fall, they are waist high for May birthday cocktails in my garden.
Then, the dilemma of ripping out the faded plants sends a sword to my heart.
Like denial of aging, I need something showy and beautiful in their place,
to cover up the emptiness of my garden in June.
The emptiness of growing old.
Each year, siphoned color, not just the snapdragons, but from me.
Then I learned something about snapdragons and life.
When a flower stalk pops its final bloom, cut it back and
it will soon bloom again, thicker and more beautiful.
Keep exploring ways to refresh, to grow in your changing beauty,
to sustain vigorous life.
Tired from the summer heat, they stand, wilted and spent of color.
Find the beauty in aged stalks as seed pods burst and fall like popcorn
leaving the essential base of who you are,
rejuvenating in the shade of zinnias, coneflowers, daisies, family, friends.
And the snapdragon will rise again in the fall, building life on life itself.
Written by Deborah Llewellyn
Beaufort, NC
May 2025