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Bloom Anyway
- Payton Hoegh
- Mar 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 20
by Payton Hoegh
After months of brutally dry conditions in Southern California, a desolate milieu that contributed to severe drought and catastrophic fires, the rains have finally come. With them, the landscape has transformed. Arid stretches of scraggly, brittle grasses are lithe and renewed. Scrubby chaparral that was little more than dusty-sage tangles on the hills now hold a livelier hue. It’s as if spring has brushed it all with vibrant watercolor, paint damply glistening, still soaking into the page.
This year, I’ve been able to trace the emergence of spring with more than these much-welcome views. There’s a feeling beyond sight that I’ve come to associate with this season's turn.
For months, my wife and I have been working to renew the land we tend. We’ve scattered seeds, sprinkled compost, and planted dozens of native plants in the degraded soil—dry, chalky fill dumped in the hills around our home over decades. As we weathered the harshest seasons, the hardy adaptations of the Southern California wilds mirrored our own hard-won resilience in the face of illness, death, loss, and disruption, we carefully watered lilac and buckwheat, yarrow and sunflowers, woolly bluecurls and white sage. In that time, I’ve felt the shift in seasons on my fingers, seeping into my gloves as dirt enlivened by careful amendment and the uncertain gift of rain has turned to soil, the passive dormancy of dust giving way to the living possibility of detritus. Somehow, that sense settles in my skin every time I think of the shifting season. I feel spring as a phantom chill in sun-warmed hands as I watch lemonade berry burst into life and deer weed sprawl.
That same mysterious cool-warm sensation takes hold of my heart when I look at the old octopus agave outside my window.
As winter’s chill has faded, this incredible succulent—planted years before our native revitalization project—has opened to the sun. Its long, twisted leaves stretching several feet wide have been steadily overshadowed by a pale green spike. Today, it towers over me at nearly 13 feet tall. It is beautiful… and heartbreaking.
Octopus agave bloom only once. This ever-lengthening death spike arriving with spring’s early graces signals that a plant that has been with us since we made this place our home will soon be gone. So, it’s a bittersweet thing to watch this unique display. Fitting for the strange circumstances of this particular spring, the world’s anxiety unveiling a sort of unbidden shroud on even joyful things. Lemonade berry on the tongue. A persistent ache in the soul. Yet, for all the bitterness I feel at a world that so often feels off-kilter, rains that we wish would have come sooner, a passing season marked by tragedies, the slow arrival of spring far from untouched by this restless malaise, I’m struck somehow by the sweetness in it.
While I’m not ready for the empty space that will be left when the agave no longer looms, I’m anticipating the beauty of its bloom. More than that, I know that this flowering holds more than a striking blossom in pale recompense for a heavy loss. We’re already preparing to collect the seeds and bulbils this rare sprouting will produce.
From death, life. A not-so-final flower and even a gift of abundance beyond what we have known. That’s what winter and spring—the natural progression from season to season—always bring.
As Howard Thuman put it, “...all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new lives, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint…“
Sometimes, we get too caught up in the cold and dark to remember that planting anything—a seedling, a memory of happy times, a movement for change—is an act of commitment, trust, and hope.
We forget, too, that we need the same for ourselves.
In the depths of winter, when the world seems cold and dim, and in spring when some things pass away and new life begins, keep planting seeds of hope.
In dry times and rainy seasons, warm sun and bitter cold, when the time is right, you’ll be ready to bloom.
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