Roses and Bamboo

I remember going through the store as a child and seeing tiny containers of miniature roses, and thinking to myself that these were the most beautiful flowers in the world.  

So naturally when I decided to try my hand at indoor horticulture as an adult, I started with a miniature rose.  Within a few weeks, it got mites and died.  I bought another one.  Within a few weeks, it got some sort of a fungus thing and died.  So I wised up and did some online research on miniature roses and then bought another one.  Within a few weeks, it got both mites and a fungus thing and died. 

A smarter person may have scrapped the whole miniature rose concept.  Not me, I was going to make it work.  I just needed to figure out how to keep the plant healthy.  I did even more research and bought all the necessary sprays and fertilizers and then bought another plant.   After a long drawn out three months of battling mites and fungus thing, the rose died.  I really, really wanted to have a healthy happy miniature rose, but the roses simply wouldn't grow for me.  

Fast forward a decade.  I happen to pick up a bamboo plant at an outdoor market.  I didn't think much of it and set it on my desk.  Based on my experiences with the roses, I didn't expect it to live very long.  We've had a rough time together. I've forgotten to water it for week long stretches, and as result had to cut way half of it's leaves from time to time.  At one point all it's leaves turned yellow, and I found out I was supposed to be giving it fertilizer, so I had to cut it back down to the stalks to start over.  Yet it came back to life and it's still with me.  

I'd venture that we all have miniature roses and bamboos in our life.  While we constantly strive to make the roses bloom only to watch them shrivel away in our hands, there is a bamboo plant we keep in the background that seems to grow no matter what.  If we could simply walk away from the wasted effort on the miniature roses and instead really focus on helping that bamboo grow, we'd find our time is better spent and the results much more satisfying.  That's my deep thought for the day. :)