I hate to pull plants. It almost feels like I’m committing some sort of murderous act. I should not be surprised that when I place the tiny seed into the rock wool cube that I’m starting a relationship and beginning a journey. It’s just a plant, but it’s my plant and it brings me such joy and excitement. As the seed thrusts itself out of the cube to form a tiny stalk with a pseudo-leaf through the unfolding of the first vegetation and on into the full blossoming of a mature plant; each phase brings excitement.

Every day when I check on the plants I make new discoveries. A new flower. A new bean. A new branch. The tomato plants have grown three inches. The fullness and lushness of the green foliage amazes me. How it all happened seems a mystery — understood and explained by Science, but still such a mystery.

When I’ve planted too many seedlings and some not needed I find it almost irreverent to discard them. They must be planted somewhere. They must be given a chance to develop into what Nature intended for them. It just seems wrong to destroy the life and potential that they have. Yet, they are just plants.

When one has run its course and it is time to replace it with a newer plant, also filled with potential, it is agonizing to pull up the fully grown plant. Yet, it is after all, just a plant.

I wonder sometimes: did I feel this way when I was younger? Did I find myself conflicted with these thoughts when I tended my garden in my teens or my twenties? I remember pulling up lettuce and broccoli when they had run to term after the Spring growing season but do not recall any pangs of guilt and regret. I wonder — is this feeling of loss about the plant, or something else?

In the SciFi movie “Bladerunner” Roy mournfully observes, “ I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

I’ve lived in such a variety of places from California to Michigan to Florida to New Mexico, Arizona and back to California again. I’ve been to Guatamala, to Hondurous, to Costa Rica and El Salvador. I was born in Hawaii and have played on the tundra of Alaska as a boy. I’ve roamed the deep woods of Michigan, Tennessee and Colorado and have explored the cities of San Francisco, Chicago and Washington DC. I’ve crawled deep into the earth exploring underground caverns and have Scuba dived with sharks.

The many things I’ve seen and have done will be gone, like drops in the rain as Roy says. I will leave but my son will continue on to explore, to create, to achieve and in time also to move aside for his children. It’s the natural order of things; I don’t like it. It’s good for the species; I don’t care.

My new tomato plants are 18 inches tall with healthy branches and leaves stretching 2 feet across. I’m glad I pulled out the older plants, and am eager to see what these new ones become. If successful they will produce fruit that we will enjoy and share.

I don’t miss the old plants — I could plant them again. They wouldn’t be the same plants, though they’d seem the same to me. When we are gone we are replaced. Our children are just like us. They look like us, talk like us have many of the same mannerisms as we do. Yet they are not us. Even if my son were an exact clone of me, he still would not be me. Only I am me. So I think after all that these pangs are not about the plants, but about something more — something deeper — that must be part of growing older. Thoughts that start to grow, just like the plants. Thoughts that are natural given our mortality.

Yes, they were just plants, yet they were my plants. And I will miss them.