When Glorious Doesn't Happen

...through painful toil you will eat of the ground

all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and

thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

Genesis 3:17b-18

I'm sure you recognize the above picture - it graced my blog from last week about my wonderful new plant - the bottlebrush buckeye, that I had spent two years searching for, and finally found one at a huge nursery in Ashland.  Ah, yes - my happy thoughts about my wonderful plant and how it would soon be the star of my yard and garden.

It's interesting how life has a way of throwing us some very large curve balls.  A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was time to get it in the ground.  I was concerned because the leaves had not made much significent growth (as you can tell from the picture, this thing has huge leaves) nor had they turned the dark green pictured above, and I felt it just needed a large planting hole and a lot of water.  So I delivered exactly that.

Within a few days of placing the shrub in the ground, it began to fail.  Each day when I would go out  and trim, water, etc., the buckeye's leaves looked a little worse for the wear.  It appeared that they were - well, wilting.  The days went by and the leaves wilted a little more and a little more.  I decided I had better call the nursery, so scurried around for my paperwork.  When I found it, I saw something that I had not noticed before.  On the bottom of the receipt were the words NO GUARANTEE FOR ANY PLANT.  Ooo, boy.  So I was on my own.

I went to the trusty Internet, and found that this shrub is highly susceptible to a common fungus that lives in the ground, and it gives the plant........ wait for it ...... Wilting Disease.  If the bottlebrush is wilting where it is planted, you have to transplant it somewhere else that hopefully does not have the fungus.  I ran out to the yard and yanked the plant out of the hole, shook off the ground dirt and placed it in a large container with potting mix.  I took my loppers and cut off the branches with wilted, dead leaves (almost all of them), and set the container in a part sun/part shade area.  The Internet said that the Bottlebrush Buckeye is an extremely hardy shrub, so I am watering it, and watching it, and hoping that somehow this very expensive plant will pull out of it.

My father always said, The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry (quoting Robert Burns).  Too many times when life seems to be going quite well, something jerks it around and sends it careening off in another direction.  That's one of the reasons God is so very important to me.  When life is going nuts around me, He is the stable center - the unmoving fortress - the Rock of my existence. When everything and everyone else fails, God does not. 

P.S.  God and I have had long talks about my shrub, and I know that He stands with me, watering and watching and hoping for a turnaround.