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When Brittany S. Pearce turned nine, she asked her parents for a cat. Having some doubts about their daughter's maturity and sense of memory, they struck a deal with her. If she could successfully raise a vegetable garden for three years, proving she was responsible enough to care for living things, they would buy her a cat for her twelfth birthday. She really wanted a cat, so she agreed. The next day, she went to Home Depot with her dad, who refused to help her with anything except pushing the cart around. She explained her situation to the nice man in the orange apron, and he set her up with a plastic tray he called a "Jiffy Pack" with little circles of hard dirt and ten brightly-colored seed packets. She chose vegetables that her best friend in the world, Santana, liked- bright red tomatoes and orange carrots and yellow squash and green beans. She was a little disappointed that she couldn't grow the whole rainbow, but there wasn't anything blue, and she didn't like eggplant- the only purple thing they had seeds for.
Jeff in the orange apron smiled when she explained her problem. He pulled out a card that had the store sign on it, and handed it to her dad. "I'll make you a deal, sweetie. I have blueberry bushes and grapevines that I trim every spring. If you manage to make those seeds grow, come back in the spring and I'll teach you how to grow from clippings."
Jeff made a step-by-step guide with extra bonus tips and drawings on the back of her receipt. She read the little book that came with the kit four times, starting on the car ride home. And then she planted her seeds, putting the little tray on the shelf in the garage. She watered them, and when the first little leaf popped out of the dirt a week later, she showed it off to everyone- Santana first(it was Friday, and she was sleeping over), Mom and Dad, then the mailman, then Kurt when he came over for a tea party, then Santana's friend Noah-who didn't look anything like the old guy in the Bible story, which made it confusing-and all of her mom's friends.
She cared for her baby plants, bringing them outside during the day and inside at night, making sure they had enough water and didn't get to hot or too cold.
***
Kurt Hummel was an orange tree. Unlike selfish carrots, they made tons of sweet, sweet fruit every year once they were big enough, plenty to share with all your friends. Even when they played dress-up and had tea parties as kids, Kurt was good at sharing. He let her wear his crowns and sensible heels. Orange trees made pretty flowers in the spring and colorful fruit in the summer, and they always smelled good.
When she was eleven, she got a seedling orange tree, and like those baby tomatoes, she had to bring it in every night, and leave it in the garage all winter. It always got droopy and sad when she left it inside, no matter if she watered it and left it a nightlight and sang Edel Weiss to it. But The Better Homes and Gardens Garden Book said that the frost could kill it, so no matter how sad it made the tree, she brought inside faithfully, every winter.
Last fall was Kurt's first winter as a baby tree. He had to go someplace safe and warm, even if he didn't smile when he sang "Hey, Soul Sister" and didn't get any solos and didn't look bright and colorful with his clothes. He had to, because otherwise the frost would kill him. But he came back in the spring, and he was taller and stronger and started to bloom again.
But her orange tree grew out of pot after pot, and pretty soon it was too big to bring inside. So she brought one of her favorite fleece blankets outside, and wrapped it around the base of the small tree. When it started snowing, she covered the tip with one of her fuzzy hats. And it got bigger and bigger, and she covered the new branches with mittens. Santana even donated one of her old scarves to the cause. It was, her mother said, a very fashionable young tree. Next winter, Burt won't be able to send Kurt to Dalton academy, which everyone said was more expensive than even Ms. Sylvester's car. But next winter, Kurt's going to be bigger, and stronger, and he's got people with him. All his Dad could do was put him someplace safe and warm. But now he's got his dad's blankets, and Finn's puffy vests, and Blaine Warbler's fuzzy blue-and-red scarf to protect him. He's even got a fierce Santana Lopez Scarf of Protection, and those are hard to come by. Every year, it will get a little easier for him to survive. She just wished he didn’t have to go through winter.
Santana's Uncle Rigo says that in Arizona and Texas and California, which are all warmer than Ohio, that orange trees can live outside the whole winter long, and don't even need any scarves. Maybe when Kurt wasn't in high school any more, he could go someplace warm, someplace without any winters.
Now her baby orange tree is tall, and strong, but it still wears her blanket and hat, and Santana's scarf. Brittany knows that the tree likes them, so she lets him keep them.
***
Brittany loved those baby plants. She put them in pots when the roots started poking out the bottom of the little dirt pods, and then she had to bring in all these little pots every night. It took a lot of time. But Santana was really smart, and one day she came over pushing a wheeled plastic bookshelf like the kind some of the teachers had. The loaded all of the plants into that, and then they only had to push it into the sunlight every morning when it wasn't too cold.
And then Spring came! She got Dad to build her a planter box- he said it didn't count as helping, because she had to do three hours of his chores in trade. She planted the green beans along the back of the planter box- Jeff had told her to, but she didn't understand why until they got big and started climbing up her metal fence. Then it made a lot of sense. She thought, sometimes, that most things adults told her were like that. They sounded really crazy, but some day they would stop sounding crazy and start sounding really smart. The carrots went in little rows, but she felt bad putting the tomato plants in cages. She checked out three different books on tomatoes out of the library, and saw why- they needed support. Like, now that she and Santana had Puberty, they had to wear support bras. Maybe tomatoes went through puberty, too. But one of the books said that tomatoes sometimes grew upside down, without cages. So that's what she did.
***
Sam was interesting. Brittany thought he might be like those berry clippings he got from Jeff. Right now, he looked really skinny and pale and not very healthy, because he'd gotten uprooted and didn't have any place to live. The clippings she got were just stems- they didn't have any roots or flowers or fruit or leaves. But she followed Jeff's instructions, and gave them RootGro, and plenty of water, and sandy loam soil to grow in. When they finally grew roots, they got sweet fruit and strong handsome stems. That's how she knew Sam's family would survive living in a motel and not having any money. They were just like berries. They might get kind of ugly in the meantime, but they would get healthy with enough love and attention.
***
Over the summer, Brittany proudly watched her plants produce fruit. Pulling the carrots made her sad- it didn't make any sense for her to kill the plant, just to eat its root. The bean-squash-tomato way made a lot more sense- they just kept on making more and more and more. More yellow squash then they could ever eat. She gave some to her teachers and her friends, and then brought her little red wagon filled with surplus to the Farmer's Market, where she sold them for a penny apiece and made enough to buy Santana a bottle of that red nail polish she stared at every time they went into the drug store.
One of the other Farmers said she could put them in bags of ten or twelve next time, and that way she wouldn't have to carry all those pennies home. She would have dimes instead! And dimes were shinier.
***
Now Rachel Berry, she was a grapevine. Within a few years, Jeff's little baby grapevines had grown up her patio cover and covered it completely. Her mom said it made it romantic. Santana just said it made it harder for them to get to the grapes. Grapes were sometimes sweet, and sometimes, if you weren't lucky, they were sour. And the vines got everywhere, blocking the light to the potted plants she'd started on the patio. Now they had to go on the other side of the yard, because the grapes took over. But they made lots of fruit, so it wasn't all bad. It was just obnoxious, and didn't share well.
***
Come winter, and Brittany was bribing Noah to help her and Santana build more planter boxes. Now she was ten, and was allowed to use the hammer and nails all on her own. Plus, their neighbor two doors down had replaced his fence, and let her have the old fence boards, which were perfect for planter boxes. Jeff taught her and Santana how to cover the bottom of the boxes with special fabric which kept the weeds from coming up. This time, Dad gave her fifty dollars and let them go into the store alone. It was really exciting. In addition to last year's seeds, minus the carrots, but with more tomatoes, Brittany chose some herb seeds, because her mom was always complaining about how the dry ones at the store just didn't taste right. Santana chose zucchini and cucumbers and three different kinds of onions.
The cashier saw her selections and laughed. "A prickly one, are you? Well, at least it'll keep bugs from eating them."
***
Mercedes was rosemary. Rosemary was tough. It survived anything. Once, she'd gone away to cheer camp and Puck, who had promised to come by and water her plants, forgot half of them. She'd sent him a list! It wasn't that hard! She'd come back on the bus and her strawberries were drooping, the leaves of orange tree looked sad and brownish, and the spinach had wilted completely. It was a lost cause. But the rosemary looked shiny as ever.
The thing that most people didn't know about rosemary was that it bloomed. It would live on barely any water and zero attention, but if you gave it water faithfully, it made these beautiful purple blossoms. Mercedes was like that. She didn't need a man. But at prom, when Sam asked her to dance, her face just lit up, and she was really beautiful.
***
She'd overestimated how many tomatoes one family could eat. She got more seeds than the year before, and had some surviving plants, too. Her harvest was enormous, and they had tons of beans and squash and zucchini, too. She sold cart-fulls every third Saturday, when the farmer's market met. Her mom also taught her how to dry the beans, and how to can tomatoes and make spaghetti sauce using the fresh onions and basil. The berry bushes started making fruit, and Grandma had heard about Brittany's garden and brought seedlings from hers when she came for the Fourth of July-an apple tree, a peach tree, and books on things like "Organic Gardening" and "Plant Propagation".
***
Brittany S. Pearce, age 10, was a voracious reader. Granted, her reading interests were limited- gardening, dance, movie and Disney channel novelizations- but she read some of those books four or five times. Most of the vocabulary words she had for school made no sense. She especially hated homophones. But plant names? They only ever meant one thing. And that's why she liked them. Breakfast was confusing- sometimes it was sweet, sometimes it was salty. Sometimes it was hot, sometimes it was cold. English class was confusing- how was she supposed to know if they were really talking about the weather, or if it was a metaphor or simile or something? Gardening was never confusing. Neither was cat biology, she learned three years later when she received Lord Tubbington, fifty dollars for supplies, and a pile of books on cat care, cat anatomy, cat health, and cat behavior. But that's another story.
She loved learning the proper names for plants. That one name meant one specific thing, and nothing else. It was a really cool system. Like, Phoradendron pauciflorum, that was Fir Mistletoe, not to be confused with Piper Mistletoe or Juniper mistletoe or Bigleaf Mistletoe. Phoradendron pauciflorum was a hemiparisitic plant native to Northern Mexico, but it can make some of its own food, but it clings onto fir trees and steals their water and nutrients. It makes pretty berries, but it's only happy when it has a tree to hang on, and it never, ever ends well for the tree.
She tried not to think too hard about Mistletoe. There were just some people that she had to remember were people, and didn't have to be nutrient-stealing parasites who sucked the joy out of music. There was always hope.
***
For Brittany's eleventh birthday, Mom got her clothes and Dad signed her up for dance lessons. She got a Venus flytrap (from Noah), a gardening hat and sturdy, pink gloves (from Kurt), and from Santana, a metal watering can with her name and tons of flowers stenciled on in hot pink paint. And on the bottom, in the same pink paint, To my best girl, Love, S
***
The summer before high school, old Mrs. MacGregor across the street gave her some rosebushes to transplant, and Santana Lopez was a lot like a rose. She had thorns, for one. Roses don't bloom right after they're transplanted. Mrs. MacGregor said they went into shock. If you tried to force them to make roses, they just went further into shock.
Sometimes it was easy to forget what was worth waiting for, easy to let the thorns and the bare stems trick you. Roses were good at that. Jeff at Home Depot said that the thorns and prickly leaves kept animals and insects from eating the plants before they were big enough to make flowers. She called him, crying, after she had to interview her cat on Fondue for Two. She thought he knew she wasn't talking about roses anymore, but he still reminded her of that first rose bush, and how she paid tender, loving care to them, and waited patiently.
"Did those bloom when you wanted them to?"
"No, they took forever. And I just kept watering them, but not too much, and adding rose food, but not too much, and making sure they were safe from the frost."
"And what happened, sweetie?"
"They made roses, the prettiest red roses. I gave one to S-Santana for her quincenera."
"So what should you do now?"
"Make sure she has what she needs, and is safe from the frost?"
"Just be her friend, sugar. Don't push her any more, but be her...tomato cage, and agricultural fleece, just like she's done for you. She'll bloom again, don't you worry."
I hope so. Brittany thought, and went to water her garden.
***
When Brittany turned twelve, Santana and Puck and Kurt all came to her party. They made their own pizza with her special homemade pizza sauce, and had ice cream sundaes (with her strawberries and blueberries and spiced apples). It was the last time she could have all of her friends together for her birthday, because in eighth grade Puck would start playing football and throwing Kurt into dumpsters, even though they were friends, and so they could never both come over on the same night. But she didn’t know that when she was twelve- all she knew was that she had awesome friends and an awesome garden and the best birthday ever. When she tore back the wrapping paper to reveal a tiny kitten in a tiny carrier, she was shocked.
After all, how was Brittany S. Pearce supposed to fit all this information about plants in her head, and all her dance routines, and all her school stuff, and remember the reason she started gardening in the first place?