I’ve only bought one new plant this spring season and that’s because I’ve never seen a real one before. It was a lavender plant which is one of my favorite scents.

When purchasing a plant from anywhere other than an actual garden center, it’s best to repot it in good soil. They are shipped in peat moss which holds moisture to ensure they don’t dry out during transit. This isn’t good for the roots and is why we’ll see so many sad plants on a clearance aisle in a couple of weeks from over watering. I dumped the lavender plant onto my potting bench and separated it into third’s. Now, I have three plants for the price of one which was $15.00.

I placed one of them in a pot to sit by the window of my writing room and the other two are in the kitchen, but there’s one pot I’ve been babying since March. I’ve written about it before here and it’s one of my all-time favorite plants. The Sparkling Siam Curcuma. It’s hard to find and if you Google it the nurseries are always out of stock. I let it go dormant over winter, but brought it out of my gardening shed and into the house, not knowing if it was dead or alive. It basically looked like a bowl of dirt.

I began watering it and placed it in a spot to receive morning light. Eventually a couple of sprigs of green emerged and I’m thrilled to see some life in that pot! I sat the repotted lavender beside it on the rusted cart for encouragement. I shifted my gaze downward at the two sprigs of green and thought about repotting it as well, but that’s when I saw two new springs barely above the dirt. Immediately I heard that voice of better judgement in my head say, “Leave it alone”, so, I stepped away.

I’ve learned that plants don’t need me nearly as much as I want them to. They know what to do when sitting in good dirt, and given the right amount of water and light.

The word, Oubaitori means, “The Japanese idea that people, like flowers, bloom in their own time and in their individual ways”, so in a world of perpetual ‘doing’, the best we can do is nothing and step away to leave it alone.