Human Flower Project
Speaking in Viburnum beyond the Grave
For the first time in 53 years, a shrub flowered in the shape of a cross. What does that (not) mean?
Nino Sechi and the flowering viburnum that spoke to him this spring, Chickahominy, CT.
Photo: Greenwich Time
Nino Sechi, a columnist for Greenwich Time, disclosed a backyard anomaly to readers this month and asked for their perspective: miracle or coincidence?
Sechi described a viburnum bush that, along with other flowering plants and shrubs, he and his late father had planted in the yard of the Sechis’ home in Chickahominy, Connecticut, in 1958. Sechi has, in other words, seen plenty of spring blossomings from this viburnum, but none like this year’s.
‘In each of the 53 years of its existence, the snowball presented us with a beautiful bouquet of white, globe-like flowers the size of baseballs. However, it had never before produced a flowered cross,” as appeared this spring.
“Coincidentally or not,” Sechi goes on to write, “my late spouse, who loved this bush, often cut some of its branches to brighten our dining room table.” Sechi noticed the cross-shaped flowering just one month before the first anniversary of his wife Elene’s death.
In his June 2 column, he solicited readers to offer their own interpretations of this phenomenon. and two weeks later passed along the responses. Of 20 replies, “All the opinions, except for two, saw the flowered cross as a positive message from my late wife.”
One reader asserted: “An intentional divine intervention by (your spouse) to give you the sign you were seeking. She wants you to know that she is fine and happy. She knew you’d be looking at that bush.” Many replies were in this vein. Others, Sechi wrote, gently saw the cross as “an accidental stroke of nature.”
Sechi’s experience repeats a fundamental human project – and of course a floral one. And it’s a project we all engage in daily, whether we acknowledge it or not, when we wonder if events are the consequence of luck, or effort, or divine intervention—or any other force.
If we consider human behavior also part of the “natural word” then when you, for example, get a promotion – or don’t get one—is that also “accidental”? Or is it a sign of some larger order of things? Does it say that you were more (or less) deserving than someone else? Or could it be, perhaps, you got a supernatural hand up? Is a tumor “coincidental” or “significant”?
Thanks to Nino Sechi for opening up during what must be a hard season, showing us the viburnum, and getting us thinking.
One Greenwich Time reader replied, “I prefer to believe we are always connected to those with whom we spent our lives and [with] whom some day we will resume doing so.” That “preference,” which Sechi shares, may itself be a miracle.