My brother’s former mother-in-law was a holistic gardener. She loved nothing better than digging in the dirt, her best dirt amended by cow manure and kitchen compost and who knows what all.
But natural what all, I can assure you. She offered me help in thinking through my early attempts at gardening. She suggested I get graph paper, spend my Januarys sketching out my plantings, but only after I made charts on the way light falls in my yard in each season, a task that should start now.
Perhaps I bought some graph paper, some tracing paper to shade the shadows. It is the kind of thing I have energy for early in a project. My follow-through is poor, though. So nothing came of it.
I think I am doing something when I read the little arrow-shaped tag stuck down in plants, the ones that tell you about spacing and growing habit and if the plant likes sun or shade. Mostly I wander around like a child, tantalized by any shiny thing, and that is how the false indigo came home with me. The name. I love the name.
And it’s real name is nice, too. Baptisia australis.
Turns out false indigo is a perennial, more bush than flower once it establishes. It grows and spreads and in a week or so from now it will send up beautiful flowers, more purple than blue. Good for me, because I have another one waiting to be planted on the other side of the porch, not quite in symmetry but close enough.
“False” in this instance means this: something that is not what it appears to be. Baptisia is not the stuff that makes our jeans blue, but then neither is true indigo, not anymore.
But there is something romantic, slightly forbidden and therefore exciting about anything with the word false in front of it. False front, false bottom, false face. A word that leads to wrack and ruin, yet an allurement, even so.
But false indigo is a happy plant, and about the only thing it attracts are butterflies. The Frosted Elfin, the Wild Indigo Duskywing, the Hoary Edge butterfly. Baptisia lives in regular soil, resists pests and bother, fills out nicely in adolescence, easily divides in fall if it has grown too big for its britches.
My kind of plant.
Should you see one potted up, the leaves will be bobbing and dipping on a slender stem and you may wonder if it has gone leggy. It has not. Take it home and love it, for it is only false in the way it resembles its exotic cousin. Give it some room, don’t bury it too deep, and wait a year or two.
It grows like it belongs and that is always a true thing. We see it in plants. We see it in ourselves, those times we know, just know, we have found our people, found the place our feet fit best, the times we thrive with the simplest and easiest of things. Sunlight. Good dirt, some appreciation, rain when it falls, contentment when it doesn’t. That feeling when something we do on a whim works out, beyond all expectation.
Greta McDonough 