Always remember the beauty of the garden, for there is peace.

Unknown

I spent Saturday morning puttering around in my garden. It’s deeply satisfying to be able to do something like that. We’re as busy as ever these days, so I hadn’t had much of a chance to get out there all week, and the week before that, other than to water a few times. For a first year garden in a high altitude and short growing season zone, and that’s still under construction, we’ve done well. The things that have done the best (so well, in fact, that you could say they’ve really just taken over, are zucchini and radishes.

This year, for the first time, I let some of the radishes go to seed. Well, I should clarify that a bit: unexpectedly and without any permission from me, a couple radishes went to seed all on their own, and after some quick research online, I decided to let those plants be, and see what happened. Here’s what they looked like this morning:

The plants are about four feet tall, and have these gorgeous little flowers, and dozens of radish seed pods, which are edible. So I spent some time clipping these, to wash and add to a stir-fry later on for dinner.

While I was browsing among these overgrown radishes, I had a little visitor:

He was interested in the flowers and I was interested in the seed pods, so we had no particular conflict and spent the morning together agreeably. It was nice to have company, really. After a while, I couldn’t resist any more and had to stop what I was doing and go get my good camera, because this little bee sort of stole my heart.

Sometimes I backed away from him a bit, because he wanted to crawl into a flower close to where I was working. And since he’s a bee, and in today’s world bees are under duress, I figured he deserves priority browsing rights.

After all, without him… there wouldn’t be anything out there for me to putter around in at all.

I took dozens of pictures of him, my scissors and gardening basket forgotten at my feet, and it occurred to me that if I hadn’t let these radishes go to seed, I would never have had this day, this morning, this moment.

With this bee.

After a while, he left, and I went back to clipping radish seed pods to cook later on this evening. I got more than a cupful.

Then my older daughter, who’s home for the weekend after moving back to Denver last week to start her second year at CU, came out to find me and we lingered together out there, taking more pictures, clipping more radish pods, marveling over the little things.

And after that, I came upstairs and sat down at my laptop and wrote a few lines of poetry about this bee. Which is something I haven’t been able to do for a long time. Life has a knack of getting in the way of writing, but at the same time, life can also unexpectedly jump start it too.