Dahlias and Japanese Beetles

My mother was a gardener. She would rather be in the garden than anywhere else. She did not excel at cooking or baking. She hated housework. She was a good teacher and loved to collect and share knowledge but mostly she liked to garden.

She had two large vegetable gardens and many flower beds around the house and yard. As a kid I would get called into forced labour. Unless I wanted to be put up for adoption, weeding and hoeing were not an option. Once my father caught me reading a book on a sunny, summer afternoon and his only comment was, “Why aren’t you helping your mother in the garden? Put the book down and get out there.” My father was not against reading. He was just in favour of me helping my mother.

Once I married, my beloved became the master gardener. He was the one to plant and weed, to trim and hoe. But for these last four years it is a bug that has bitten me hard. Every spring I carve away more lawn and plant more perennials. As the nurseries and garden centres open I prowl around looking for new and interesting plants. I delight every morning looking out my window to see what has happened over night. Which plant is coming into bloom? Which one needs staking or trimming today? Which flowers will I choose to dress up my dining table this week?

A couple of years ago a friend turned me on to dahlias. They are magnificent, tall bloomers that brings colour and splash at this time of year. To my chagrin they also bring Japanese Beetles. The darn (I am being polite here – I often call them much worse) little creatures burrow into the blooms and devour them. They turn the buoyant blossoms to brown stubs if I don’t intervene. Who would ever imagine that something so small could make for such annoyance? I tried Morning Glories this year for the first time. The Japanese beetles have riddled the leaves with their infestation. I have hung beetle traps. I regularly go out and ‘dispatch’ the ugly little critters but they just keep coming. I am forced to ask – in the scheme of things -what good are Japanese Beetles? (Oh, and don’t get me started on the groundhog who is eating my flowering kale.)

So, I have spent some reflection time wondering if the garden is a parable for life. Jesus certainly used nature and agriculture a lot to draw illustrations for God’s love. Can I think of a parable about Japanese Beetles? Nope. I am too mad at them right now. But I do know that there are many things in our world right now that are causing devastation and sorrow and the weight and heaviness of those catastrophes (think Haiti, think Afghanistan) cannot begin to be measured against my battle in the garden.

In our Prayer group yesterday, and in my sermon that we just recorded for this Sunday’s virtual service, I spoke of the heaviness of the world news and how hard it is to our human psyche to carry so much negativity. Nadia Bolz Weber, in her blog this week, said that our human psyche was made to hold the sorrow and tragedy of our ‘village’ not of the whole world delivered in real time all the time. Some days it is just too much information. We have to compartmentalize the worry and sorrow in order to cope. I guess I do that in a way each morning. When the riddled leaves of my morning glories and the battered blossoms of my dahlias depress me I look to the cheery faces of the snapdragons and the resilient blooming of the day lilies. Maybe that is the parable. We will always have sorrow, but God’s bountiful creation also delivers sufficient beauty to remind us to keep on.