GODSTUFF: Requiem for a fig tree

Last summer, I moved from Chicago to Southern California, and my stubborn hope of someday being a successful gardener received a healthy dose of optimism. Here, in our village by the sea, seemingly everything flourishes.

Bougainvillea pours over their walls. Claret, orange and sunset-yellow kangaroo paw plants grow as high as my waist. Bird of paradise blossoms peek over the top of my second-floor patio, held aloft by their two-story-high “tree.”

And hummingbirds flit from shrub to shrub outside my bedroom window, pulling sweet nectar from the orange, blue, red and hot-pink blossoms.

I don’t even know what those plants are called. But they are thriving, unattended, a spectacle of wild joy. They simply bloom and grow, cared for only by the Creator, who is, of course, the constant gardener.

At the beginning of the summer, I drove to a nursery in the canyon about a couple of miles from my house and wandered through the riot of color, inhaling the heavenly aromas of jasmine and lemon verbena in deep, happy gulps.

The possibilities seemed endless. Perhaps my perennially black thumb might turn green for the first time.

This is my year, I thought. No, I believed it.

I carefully chose an assortment of whimsically-shaped succulents for my kitchen window solarium, two voluptuous hanging baskets of a hybrid lotus flower with flowers that looked like tiny toucan beaks, and a couple of potted night blooming jasmines to scent the top-floor lanai.

“Don’t forget to water them,” the kindly, be-dreadlocked nursery manager said, kindly, of my new lotus plants. “That’s all they really need. But once they dry up — that’s it. They’re done.”

I have to believe that God looks at me with the same kind of stubborn hope and faith with which I choose my (usually doomed) plants. Maybe this is the year, God must think, that she will blossom, flourish, and bring forth fruit. Even when I choke on weeds and wither, God remains hopeful.

Earlier this summer, perhaps heartened by the fact that the jasmine was still night-blooming even if the hybrid lotus had shriveled (someone forgot to water them), my husband and son gave me a fig tree.

The theological implications of potential fig-a-cide gave me pause. In the Bible, figs are mentioned more than 30 times and are often used as a metaphor for faith — either healthy, fruit-bearing faith or the anemic, disappointing, doomed variety.

So if it doesn’t bear fruit, are you gonna curse it?” one of my cheeky friends asked the day we carefully placed the burgeoning fichus in a large terracotta container outside my home office door.

“Ha ha ha,” I muttered as flop-sweat mixed with the potting soil on my palms.

“Please don’t wither,” I’d whisper ever time I passed the fig.

Gardening is an inherently hopeful enterprise. We put the seeds or seedlings in the ground, water and watch, hoping that leaves will leaf, flowers will bloom, and fruit will appear sometime down the road.

Unfortunately for me, gardening is not one of my spiritual gifts. Nor does a green thumb appear to be one of those genetic marvels conferred intact from one generation to the next.

My mother, Helen, is a wonderful gardener. She can grow practically anything with great success. Mom even managed to keep a Christmas cactus that belonged to my grandfather alive for more than 80 years, coaxing blossoms from its ropy branches twice a year.

I, on the other hand, can kill almost anything — even those almost plasticine green plants that abide in every doctor’s office I’ve ever visited. Six weeks in my home and they’re goners.

Yet, hope springs eternal.

Even when the fig came down with some kind of parasitic blight that first pocked its leaves with brown lesions and then knocked most of them to the grown, yellow and, yes, withered, my thin faith held fast. I talked to the nursery experts, sprayed the wan tree with Epsom salts, carefully pruned the dead bits away and watered it, lovingly (and prayerfully.)

Somehow I kept the faith, which is, we are told in Scripture, the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

It’s now August — Lughnasa, the Celts call it —threshold of the harvest season. And, despite my best efforts, the fig tree still looks pretty dodgy.

But nestled among its scrawny branches and against all odds, there are two dozen little green figs.

Each day they grow a little plumper, filled with hope, awaiting the harvest of first fruits.