The ever elusive flowering shrub

I enjoy gardening. I love the smell of fresh, wet dirt under my fingernails and the way time just passes by when I'm communing with Mother. And I'm pretty good at it. Last year I grew a backyard vegetable garden (from seeds!) which would have been a pretty good harvest if it hadn't been for my dogs' love of squash. But I don't feel justified in calling myself a gardener... yet.

Among my favorite plants is the gardenia. I love the fragrant flowers. I love the evergreen leaves. I absolutely love that it's a perennial. In my opinion, gardening is great, but if you have to do it every year because the plants won't survive, what's the point? (There are a few plants in my "must have" list that don't fit this description, but I assure you, they are few.) I had two gardenias at my wedding, so they're almost a symbol of love. And everything I've read says they're an easy plant to grow. I wholly disagree.

The two potted gardenias that held a prime spot at my wedding were going to be cherished and loved and would be planted in a prime spot in whatever home my husband and I bought. Love plants blooming love year after year. The plants disagreed. About three months after we were married, I came home to find them dead-ish. Dying. I coddled them, I sang to them, I re-potted them. They died. I felt like a failure.

But the love survived. Don't be alarmed. My husband and I are still happily married and just bought a house last October. After the first walk-though I loved it. After the second walk-through I noticed the healthy blooming gardenia planted by the front door and announced that this would be our house! The buying process went well and we moved in. The thing that gardening websites don't tell you is that gardenias must have olfactory senses. I swear the gardenia smelled my presence as a "death-bringer." It had been lush and beautiful (and a perennial, I might add, due to it's evergreen-ness) and was nearly dead in a week. I scoured the internet looking for tips and stumbled across a site that told me if I could scratch the wood and see green, it might could be salvaged.

So I set to remixing soil with peat for good drainage and fertilizer for good pH. I tested and made sure the sun was right. And then I replanted the nearly dead gardenia. That night I had a dream that I would find a beautiful, lush, thriving gardenia. What I found was this.

I was heartsick. How could such an easy plant to grow be such an easy plant for me to kill? So when I noticed that there was a special on gardenias, what other choice could I make other than buy two new ones and start over. And this time I'm doing it right. I'm planting with intimidation. Maybe these new gardenias have a survival instinct and will learn to behave. And perhaps if these two survive, I can call myself a gardener.