Blueberry Bushes

Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Miracle Max, The Princess Bride

See, I am making all things new!
Revelation 21:5

I love gardens, but I’m no gardener. The best I can do is make sure I have a few of those plants that somehow grow despite my unintentional neglect. So I’m not sure what I was thinking when, about a year and a half ago, I bought a couple of blueberry bushes and thought I’d grow them in pots on my patio.  I had visions of fresh blueberries. (Note to master gardeners: no laughing please.)

After a few initial verdant months of luscious life, the bushes began a slow decline into what they are now, brittle twigs with hard shriveled leaves.

But last week, when I started to carry them to the back corner of the yard where their potting soil could return to the ground in literal earth-to-earth fashion, I noticed something else about these mostly-dead plants.

In the sage words of Miracle Max, “mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some of the twigs are still slightly green. And on the tips of some twigs are tiny buds–some unexpected new life is coming.

So I’ve planted them in my untamed garden to see how they’ll do released into the wild rather than confined in plastic pots on a patio.

Where there’s even a little green of life–even if unseen and unknown at first–there’s still hope for something unexpected to grow. And you may have to take a chance, escape the confines of your plastic pot, and plant yourself in the wild of an untamed garden to let the new growth bloom.