Friday's Foibles  "In Defense of the Bleeding Heart"


Happy Friday!  I'm sure your week had its problems, mishaps, glitches...it's weekly fare of foibles.  We ought not expect otherwise.  But take heart!  Even fauna and flora have their garden variety of foibles...so too must we!  As always, it's all in how you look at it. 


Last weekend when I was weeding and my husband was spreading mulch, he remarked, "I wish you hadn't planted so many of these Bleeding Heart plants...they don't last long enough and then they turn yellow and look horrible half the summer!"  I replied, "I planted them because I love them,  they do well in shade, they were inexpensive, they mature fast, and they are beautiful...what more do you want from a plant?"  I felt as though he'd insulted a relative and I was compelled to defend my beloved Bleeding Hearts!


Depending on where you live, you may not know what a Bleeding Heart plant looks like...and you should...they are magnificient! Google an image of one if you have to.  My biggest complaint with my dear husband's complaint was that he wasn't looking at things fairly...or rather, fully.  Much of the magnificence of the Bleeding Heart happens long before those gorgeous little hearts are even the twinkle in an eye.  When the ground softens in March here, I begin my watch for them.  Years ago, I planted a row of eight bleeding heart plants along the side of my garage "where the sun don't shine" and, boy,  have they "done well!"  If I am lucky, I will catch The Day and I will see the winter-tight ground disturbed, maybe even a little clump of soil shoved aside by their coming!  A day or two later (depending on the weather of course), their green heads, still bowed down from the effort, will appear above the earth.  You could walk right by it...nothing more than a clutch of reddish green stalks standing two, maybe three inches high, curled up tight at their tips just like an old person who can no longer stand tall...except that this aging process happens in reverse.  In the weeks to follow, it is a daily lesson in science and Beauty.   Every year I tell myself that some year when I can, I am going to plant my chair beside them some warm spring day and just watch, because I swear you must be able to literally watch them grow!  Each day as they grow taller, they uncurl, unfurl their treasure...fringy fists of foliage open to reveal rich, green palms of three fingers each.  Then, the tiny hearts make their appearance! In an amazing display of order, they hang from the stem, in a progression of development and color, each one just barely bigger and brighter than its neighbor!   You can see that the tiniest white pod at the close end carries within it the tinge of the pink heart-shaped cap that will grow and deepen,  before lifting up and away from the pod, resembling a heart with pigtails and the innocent white face beneath.  This beautiful "before your eyes" show lasts for a few weeks.  A progression of perfect pink hearts dangle profusely from slender branches like a charm bracelet from a wrist.  Perfection! 


Well, almost perfection, because, as my husband rightly observes, it doesn't last.  But what more can he want, I think to myself later on, as I pull weeds from a smaller Bleeding Heart planted two years ago, which offered me fewer but no less perfect hearts.  I thought of all this plant had done in the last weeks, all on its own and in the shade no less...an annual miracle if you ask me!  It had indeed done well.  Shouldn't that be enough?  When I produce such near and beautiful perfection and last a long time, then I'll consider a different favorite plant!  But I don't see that happening any springtime soon!


Thanks for reading.  Let it steep!