Vitamin Defeat

There comes a day in each gardener's summer when nothing remains but defeat. In my summer, anyway. It's inevitable. And this year, the raspberries staged my surrender. So carefully I had pruned them. Pulling each stringy imposter, the suckers that steal water and space, I had created a masterpiece. Docile plants, lined up like soldiers, tied to their guide wires for emphatic good measure.

We're the ones in control here. Don't forget it.

But come August, no matter my work in the spring, the berries look always the same. Scraggly things, lolling at odd angles in the sun, ignoring my glare as I pass through their gauntlet with care.

How do they do it? Transform in a season from domestic to Amazonian and strangely unnerving. What's their reason?

It's subversive. I debate their worth from my front room. They've beat me ... again.

And then I discover what they've really been hiding.

Berries - a surprise harvest - hover beneath each errant leaf. It seems that this outgrowth of brambles, unlooked-for and scorned, had reasons I could not have planned for.

I harvest in silence.

Oh yes, it is my defeat. But victory would have tasted so much less sweet.