I remember the majestic and venerable Ginkgo trees lining boulevards on Aoyama Dori in Tokyo, and peaceful it was; that street, a main thoroughfare, would always be crammed with vehicles, but it was quiet nonetheless since you seldom hear car horns being used indiscriminately by courteous Japanese drivers and the traffic sounds seemed like 'white' background noise, barely noticed. I recall street closures to traffic on Sundays that gave residents of Tokyo the pleasurable opportunity of strolling along Shinjuku, that broad boulevard with countless shops enticing people to enter at their leisure. And it was there that I saw neat rows of yucca plants, their tall stalks of flowerheads in bloom.

Ottawa had an experiment with a street closure to traffic, when Sparks Street Mall opened and vehicles were permanently banned to give Ottawans the opportunity to stroll at leisure along that street unimpeded by traffic at any time of the day or night. Trendy shops opened on the street and it was a different experiment in social accommodation with the only traffic being that of pedestrians walking wherever they wished on that broad boulevard. The atmosphere invited the presence of street performers. Although it was a popular destination at first, it has since gone into sad decline and the city is mulling over re-opening it to vehicular traffic. 

All this to say that our garden yucca planted over two decades ago went through this past winter as it usually does, looking green and vital, only to suddenly dry up and give up its ghost come spring. So it will be replaced by another, popularly called an Adam's Needle. It never did flower generously as did the yuccas I recall from Tokyo. In all that time it had deigned to send up a flowery spike on a mere two occasions. One of them, the result of a particularly harsh winter that had done some damage to the plant, spurring it to invest in survival. That caused it to send up a flower stalk, to our great delight.

The plant had also borne many offshoots over the years, which I had carefully sundered from the mother plant and re-planted elsewhere in the garden, but to no avail. Those offshoots that looked so promising, never did take.

But there are always losses in the garden; some years winters are more harsh than others and some plants are damaged as a result. The springtime pride of our gardens, our two magnolia trees, are now in their full, colourful glory. They were not meant for our climate, and not known to prosper here. So in their first years we had always taken care to cover them with winter blankets to shield them from extreme cold. As they grew larger it was no longer feasible to do that, so we just left them to contend with the environment as best they could. And they did so, extremely well, gifting us with magnificent blooms every spring.

Yucca: take note.