Celandine Poppy
On Roots, Gifts, and the Gardens We Inherit
My morning ritual is slow by design. Coffee in hand, I walk the boundary of my backyard. The intentional pacing and ground gazing is the closest I get to the old days of zen retreats and kin-hin, walking meditation. Instead of counting my breaths, I look for new shoots and acknowledge with delight the quick green growth of some plants.
On Monday, a tiny dollop of yellow at the edge of my vision pulled my attention - celandine poppy (stylophorum diphyllum). Its first bud, all fuzzy and yellow, still turned in on itself. Just beginning to unfold.
Last summer I answered a call in our Kansas Native Plant Society Facebook group: Moving to Oregon. Want to share plants from my native gardens.
Some people rescue dogs. I rescue plants.
I arrived with a shovel, nursery pots, and paper grocery bags.
Mandy greeted each new arrival. She pointed out the plants to take, told us what they were, how they grew best. She was passing on her knowledge and experience and encouraging us to take a chance - on the plants, of course, but also on our ability to root them in our gardens. She was realistic knowing some transplants wouldn’t survive and released us from any guilt if they didn’t make it. After all, it was August and the worst time to try to transplant any living thing in Kansas.
We aimed to keep as much soil on the root balls as possible. My pots weren’t big enough. The paper bags ripped. I ended up just walking to my car with shovels full of dirt and plants, raw-dogging it. The most real version of native transplanting there is.
Our shared love of natives turned out to be a thread that pulled everything else together. One woman had started the Lenexa Farmer’s Market. Another had helped get the Stormwater Project going, which helped me fund a backyard transition to natives including elderberry and nannyberry, fragrant sumac and asters, coreopsis and spiderwort, big and little bluestem. The plants connected us. We were no longer strangers.
I thanked Mandy and wished we had met a few years ago. Told her I'd send photos in spring so she could see her babies had made it. I gently closed the hatch on my CRV so I didn't crush the tender branches reaching for their old home. For a minute I leaned against the warmth of the car and watched; friends and strangers coming and going, digging in a yard, bound by the possibility of new growth.
In the late 70s, my family moved into our first house on Orville Avenue. I was five. Our neighbors, Annabelle and Jim Morris, welcomed us. Mrs. Morris gifted my mom with purple bearded iris from her garden. The ones that smell like grape soda. I spent hours on their back porch glider snapping beans and shelling peas. And every spring, when the western sun hit the iris petals just right, they were lit from within. The backyard was strung with magical lavender lights.
When COVID arrived my world contracted to the size of my yard. I got serious about native flowers then. In April of 2020, when everything felt like it might simply end, a stranger from my local gardening group drove to my house and brought me all kinds of transplants from her garden. Those first few rudbeckia have multiplied into a never-ending supply for my garden and my neighbors. A new thread in the spiral, two strangers becoming friends, in a Kansas backyard when the world as we knew it was ending. Laughing, learning, and sharing what grows.
I live on a corner and my sidewalk is among the most walked in the neighborhood. The kids use my retaining wall as a balance beam on their way to school. I know the dogs’ names better than their people walking them. Neighbors have watched me haul in rock by rock, load by load of mulch, plant by plant. But over the years they see the difference. A man once told me he always brings his granddaughter to my yard when the Monarchs come. A neighbor started asking what she could plant to bring more butterflies. I started a neighborhood Facebook group for native gardeners where we share seeds and transplants. We are planting webs of connection in our little neighborhood - both for the plants and for us.
Yesterday I searched for Mandy’s messages from last summer with her address and when to come to get the plants.
I sent her a photo of the poppy. Look, I wrote. She made it. I hope you are loving Oregon.
The thread held. Across all those miles. Through all that winter.
I can't imagine my life without this constant widening spiral, always expanding, never losing its center. Community, belonging, healing, joy. Plants moving from yard to yard and stranger to stranger, carrying something that outlasts any single garden.
Yesterday this tiny bud unfurled. After being planted last August in that unrelenting heat and a brutal dry spring with wildly varying temperatures, I didn’t think she’d make it. But she did. I wonder if Mandy’s tending her garden for all those years with love and attention made my poppy’s roots stronger?
I’m sure it did. And it’s an honor to continue the spiral.