Sowing Buttercups and Daisies

How did those get there, I wondered?  Jill, my gardener spouse, reminded me that we spread a packet of Buttercup seeds in some topsoil so that we could enjoy them as we walked the paths in our yard.  There are about a dozen of them this year.  We do nothing to help them grow or to come back year after year.  We just count on the rain and the sun and the warmth to keep them happy, and we hope that the deer don’t like Buttercups. (If you are singing “Build Me Up Buttercup” right now you are not alone.)

Further along the path are dozens of daisies. They are the white petal/yellow center variety (“Shasta daisy” for you gardeners).  We didn’t put them there so far as we can remember. I did sow some wildflowers about fifty yards away from their current location some eighteen years ago, so maybe they migrated there from that effort, but I won’t take the credit.  We used to mow the area where they sprout now. Maybe that is how the seeds spread.  I can’t be sure how they go there, but they are quite a picture.

Isn’t it a wonder that the Sower keeps spreading seeds that figure out a way to survive with the least bit of human help? I mean, you can mow the flowers down this year and next year you get more of them.  We live on top of what amounts to a rock quarry. Poor soil. Lots of rocks.  And the seeds keep spreading and growing anyway.  If we put some good soil down we get different flowers, the variety that need some deeper soil in which to sink their roots. I like them both, the Buttercups and the Daisies. 

The joy of exploring wild flowers is that you can’t quite be sure how they got there. Maybe you had something to do with it. Maybe nature (or God, depending on your point of view) gets the credit for putting them there, for making them grow.  I just know this much: the Sower has enough seeds that he pretty much doesn’t worry about where those seeds land.  Why, you can find flowers peeking up through the rocks, right?  The Sower just keeps on sowing, never worried that the supplies of seeds will run out, never worried about finding perfect soil to receive the gift of the seed. Sure, the Sower likes to see Buttercups take root in deep soil, but the Sower is just as happy to find Daisies sprouting in the shallow soil of fields. They are all beautiful. They all got there somehow.

“Whoever has ears, let them hear.” (Matthew 13:9)