No one will ever confuse me with our “Valley Gardening” columnist Ruthie Brown or our Alamosa Trees/Flowers columnist Marilyn Loser, and I would never give advice on how to grow anything except mold, so stay tuned to those skilled gardeners’ columns for how best to keep things green in our Valley.

The only plant that thrives in my front yard is whitetop or hoary cress (or Lepidium draba if you want to sound sophisticated), a plant in the cabbage family that earned its name by its “white top,” descriptive but not very original. Lepidium draba doesn’t really do it justice either, because they aren’t that “draba.” Whitetop is actually pretty cheery, but unfortunately it is a noxious weed, and every summer I have to pull, chop and otherwise decapitate these weeds so our dedicated weed enforcement folks won’t give me a warning or citation for growing them. (I didn’t deliberately plant them, of course, but that’s how weeds are, uninvited guests who stay for dinner but won’t help with the dishes afterwards.)

The only planting I do intentionally is my petunias. So for about as long as I have had tire planters in my front yard (nothing but class in my neighborhood) I’ve had petunias in them. Don’t ask me how I wound up with tire planters in my front yard, because I don’t still have the car(s) they rolled off of. If I did, we could have a hillbilly barbecue on the hood. At least I painted the tires.

Every summer I plant petunias in my tire planters, and they bloom all season. They are so cheerful. I like petunias because they keep their flowers and their sunny attitudes for months, a lesson for the rest of us who wilt under a bit of heat.

This year I bought some petunias but did not have time to plant them right away so I kept them in a tub my sister and her husband had given me full of goodies for my birthday. Of course I had eaten my way through the goodies but still had this lovely tub, which was perfect for keeping the petunias moist until I could plant them, which happened to be longer than I planned.

I kept them moist all right, but by the time I could plant them, they were all soggy on the bottom. (This is the technical term, so for those of you taking notes, soggy does have two “g’s” and bottom has two “t’s.”) Soggy bottom is not a pleasant condition for plants, or humans for that matter. It’s a downright crying matter for tiny humans who have not yet mastered the whole toilet thing.

At any rate, these poor petunias with their soggy bottoms stopped blooming. They were green sticks when I put them in the dirt in my planters.

I watered them, at least for a while. But I wasn’t too impressed with my bloomless petunias, and to be fair, they probably weren’t too impressed with my gardening abilities. So I stopped watering them. I wanted flowers, not green sticks in the dirt.

My mother said their flowers would probably come back.

Of course she was right. (Most wilted people will bloom again, too, if we just give them time and a bit of love.)

In spite of my deplorable care of these precious petunias, they refused to die. One day I saw two flowers, one purple, one white, in the center tire planter. I decided to start watering them again. If they were willing to give a go of it, so was I.

Now there are a dozen blooms of varying shades on those awesome little petunias in the tire planters in my front yard.

What a lesson I can learn from these cheerful flowers that refused to give up and in spite of their circumstances, to bless the world with color. We can do more than survive our challenges in life, whether “soggy bottoms,” drought or “tire planter” environments.

We can bloom!