The Plant in the Wrong Place

“There is one here I cannot read,” the girl said, kneeling at the edge of the bed with a small green thing cupped in her palm. She had grown quick at telling a true seedling from a stray, but this one wore both faces at once. Its leaves were the right shape for the crop she had sown, and the wrong colour, and it stood a little apart from the crooked green row as though it had wandered in on its own. She held it up the way she might have held up a word she did not know how to say.

Nyra took her time. She turned the stem in the light and pressed a leaf between her fingers and breathed the sharp scent of it. “I have tended this ground for more years than you have been alive,” she said at last, “and I still cannot tell you what this one is.” The girl had looked for many answers, but not that one. It seemed to her that a gardener as old and sure as Nyra should know every green thing that dared to rise in her beds.

“Then how do I know whether to pull it,” the girl asked, “or let it stand?” Nyra set the seedling gently back where it had come from and pressed the soil round it. “You leave what you cannot name,” she said, “until it shows you what it means to be. A weed will crowd and hurry and take more than its share. A crop will bide its time and repay the room you spared it. You will know the difference by autumn, and the waiting will cost you nothing but a little patience and a little room.”

The girl looked at the unnamed thing standing in its patch of bare soil. It struck her that a weed was only a plant whose use no one had yet learned, and that the same blade of green might be a treasure in one bed and a trespasser in another. “So a weed is not a kind of plant,” she said slowly, feeling her way toward it. “It is a plant in the wrong place.” Nyra laughed low and warm at that. “Now you are beginning to tend with your head as well as your hands,” she said.

They worked on together through the cool of the morning, and the girl left the unnamed seedling where it stood. It was a strange comfort to her, that small patch of not-knowing in the middle of all her careful rows. She had thought that tending meant deciding the fate of every green thing under her care. Now she understood that part of tending was learning when to hold her hand back and let the season answer a question she could not.