This week we left our house to begin life in a new one. A whole new garden of woodbugs, as it were. But before we left, our sturdy, reliable old rhubarb plant gave us a final farewell. Before I moved to that house, I had never seen a rhubarb flower. I didn’t even know it did, or maybe hadn’t considered that such a leafy, quietly steadfast anchor of the vegetable patch could put blooms out.

If you’ve never seen it before, a rhubarb’s flowering can catch you by surprise. There’s something prehistoric about it, something bordering on unseemly. It looks like a kind of plant brain on top of a thick stalk. It’s bold and unembarrassed.

And when it emerged, it felt a little celebratory. Maybe not in a congratulations-you’ve-sold-your-house-and-are-moving-on-to-exciting-things kind of way, but the timing had me reaching for that sentiment. Go rhurbarb. Go us. Let’s flower the hell out of this season, whatever it brings.

And now we are in our new home and there is a small rhubarb plant in the garden. It isn’t flowering, or even doing as well as our old one. But, bless it, it’s there. The potential for a towering brain-full of rhubarb blossoms is there. Maybe next year. You never know.

This same rhubarb plant gave us this a few years ago, and Hannah blogged about this yummy recipe a year before that.

XO

Ria