Gardening is an exercise in patience, physical labor, resilience, and attention to detail–but mostly patience. You place your plants, tend to them, water them, remove weeds, try to protect them from disease and deer and ravaging insects and other pests, accept failure and try again, and hope that your labors are fruitful.
With some plants, you need more patience than others.
Consider the “sapphire tower” plant (Puya Alpestris) being tended in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, Alabama, which is blooming for the first time in a decade. The plant is native to Andean region of Chile, where it grows in higher elevations and is pollinated by hummingbirds, who can hover by the plant between the spiky talks and dip their beaks into the fluted flowers. Removed from its native habitat (and hummingbirds), the plant grows slowly, and must be pollinated by hand, using paintbrushes. Its blooms also last for only a short while.
But when it does bloom, as it is doing now and for the next few weeks, the “sapphire tower” is a magnificent sight. I’m sure the horticulturalists in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens are feeling a tremendous satisfaction right now, and fellow gardeners can vicariously share in that feeling. It’s great to see patience and painstaking effort rewarded.
Webner House 