Category — Flower admiration

As the doctor stole nearer to Mary’s bed…he discovered the two sturdy little green heads pushing themselves above the brown earth….

‘I wonder if they-feel it so hard-to struggle up-as I,’ said Mary.

The doctor came close and bent over the pot. A small electric bedside light, shaded from Mary’s eyes, focused its rays on the two little green heads.

‘They’re not struggling at all. Nature’s gently pushing them up. When she’s ready–she’ll push you.’

Foursquare, Grace S. Richmond, pg. 197 (a little bit altered by me)

It’s been raining a lot lately. Today, it even snowed.

I believe we should always be grateful for rain. Water is wealth, and safety from fires, and no plant grows without at least some of its quenching force.

But I have to admit grey day after grey day is getting me down. So one rainy day lately, I picked up an old book I have around the house, and in it I found this passage about a pot of two tulips by a sickbed. I thought: I’d like a pot of tulips in my own house. Just to remind me that spring is coming.

I didn’t think I could actually have one, though. I like bulbs in big pots at least 18 inches (about 48 cm) across. Unless they’re my precious antique tulip bulbs, each of which gets its own pot.

And then there’s the unsavory fact that I’ve never successfully forced a bulb. My hyacinths linger in the cupboard under the sink in their bulb glasses, sulkily spouting a few fitful half-submerged stubby blooms, or simply rotting. My carefully-cultured indoor narcissus bloom - about the same time the ones outdoors do. Sometimes later.

So I’d kind of given up on the idea of bulbs indoors. And that wasn’t what was in my mind as I went to my outdoor bulb pots, poking around to see what was up, and what looked as if it were going to flower this year.

But there, completely forgotten by me, was a plain black plastic pot I’d planted with four leftover ‘Golden Melody’ tulips, the ones that didn’t fit in the big pots. Even though I’d bought a hundred of them, I wasn’t going to throw them away-and in my neighborhood, planting in the ground constitutes throwing them away. If rot doesn’t get them, usually the gophers do. Tulip bulbs are like hot french fries for gophers.

Four tulip noses* were poking out just above the soil, sampling their first breath of spring air. I picked up the pot. It was just the size to try indoors, and I could put it in one of my ceramic cachepots. That is, I could do that if they hadn’t all chipped from being left out in the big freeze last December.

They hadn’t. I found a gold-yellow one, and put it on my kitchen table with the tulips in.

In the next week, I found out what a pleasure it is to really watch bulbs grow close up. I’d thought I was doing that outside; when bulbs are going, I check them at least every few days to see how they’re evolving. I kneel on the ground. I look at them from different angles. And when I photograph them, I find myself looking at them in even more ways.

But nothing beats living a few feet away from a growing bulbs. First, their shoots came up with astonishing rapidity; in a few days, they were inches taller than their kindred, out in the cold. I got to watch the whole show, the unfurling of the tight nose into a cylinder of leaves

which opens out to allow the green bud to slowly rise on its stalk. Its lips get tinged with color and then they part, letting out the petals in an explosion of yellow, the exact same yellow as the trumpets of my ‘Dutch Master’ daffodils, blooming outside by the door.

One tepal** even did that delightful and typical tulip thing: it sported into exuberant green feathering.

Tulips seem to enjoy changing themselves; if you grow them long enough, you will see one tulip out of a batch breaking away from the others with its own variation of colors and patterns. They have the verve of individualism. They’re not afraid to try something new.

Each day I look at my pot of tulips in yellow flower, thrusting up on sturdy stems unlike the weak, staked ones from the florist. I see them blooming in a place no tulip ever thought to grow. I look at them and see the history of a Mediterranean wildflower that was stolen by northerners and introduced into eugenic breeding programs, its looks changed out of all recognition over the centuries, until a small part of its descendants came to me in a box that crossed an ocean and a continent.

I look at them and I think: yes. Spring will come.

*OK, confession time: the photo is not of that particular pot. Those of you who count will have noticed that. They’re other tulip noses I photographed that day.

**Tepals are a name for petals and sepals which look the same. Three of the tulip’s “petals” are actually sepals, while three are true petals. The layer of sepals is outside the layer of petals, and in many flowers the sepals are green and of a different texture from the petals. But in some flowers, like tulips, the sepals morph into a form so like the petals that it’s hard to tell them apart. I learned this in horticulture class so I just had to put it somewhere. I never cease to be amazed at how plants tweak themselves into so many colors and shapes.

In the midst of teeming life in a summer garden, I’m taking a moment for death. If there’s anything gardening teaches us, it’s that we can’t nourish new life without some kind of death. Heck, we can learn that from the dead, rotting things in our compost, which turn into the best soil you can get.

But death isn’t just beautiful for what it does for the next generation: it can also be beautiful in itself. The last petal of Apricot Beauty, at the top of this page, can still give me a thrill, different in nature from the unfurling buds and full, fleshed-out flowers, but a quiver that goes as deep into my soul.

Even the threat of death can be beautiful. For instance, while we consider scotch broom to be an oily, fire-hazardous, aggressive, crowding-out-natives pest; while I root up scotch broom whenever I find it in soft ground - I still couldn’t ignore its blazing yellow blooms as a backdrop for these on-their-last-legs ‘Annie Schilder’ tulips and late, tiny ‘Hawera’ narcissus.

The pale golden muscari a friend gave me dies in a quieter beauty, softly lit by sun:

This sunflower bract echoes the soft golden muscari yellow, but the grain amaranth around it points it up with fuchsia arabesques.

This dying lily foliage is another yellow, softened by the light-brown oak leaves around it, a brown that echoes the color on the fading leaves.

Lily-flowered tulip ‘Marilyn’ takes the fuchsia from the amaranth and puts it into a swirl; it’s as cheerful and sassy in its old age as I’d like to be.

And then ‘Lady Jane’ reminds us of that final step of all dying plants, the one the leads us back to life:

Bonus: if anyone still needs to be reminded of how death and life are intertwined, try this minute-long video of a tulip’s elegant dance of death:

Most people don’t think of tulip foliage as a color display, but once I saw colors in the early stages of tulips, I got on a roll looking for tulip foliage with pink and red in it. I remembered the pink-edged foliage of the Fosteriana Sweetheart, which I’d noticed and photographed last spring.

And now I’d started looking, I saw foliage with pink-edges, white edges, and deep-red-streaks peeking out of the catalogue pictures of several fosterianas.

I finally got it: reds and pinks on tulip foliage are not unusual. Greggii tulips are known for their striped and mottled foliage; the stripes are usually some form of cream and deep purple-red. kaufmannia tulips are famous for their mottled foliage, too.  Fosterianas other than ‘Sweetheart’ have color in their foliage, too. Colored tulip foliage is all over.

But tulip foliage doesn’t have to be colorful to delight. The broad leaves become a shadow catchment

with the show changing throughout the day.

Those of you who are extra-sensitive might want to skip the next picture: it’s an illustration of what happens when you don’t deer-protect your foliage; the emerging flower bud and stalk gets chomped, leaving only foliage behind to feed the bulb for another year, when, if all goes well, it will flower again..

To cheer us up from this moment of mortality, there’s the wiggly aspect of tulip foliage. I’m not quite sure what makes this happen; I don’t know if it’s related to the kind of tulip, the temperature at certain times of growth, or what. Here is a sea of ‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Dreaming Maid’ foliage, in varying degrees of wiggiliness.

Apricot Beauty seems to specialize in wiggily: this is an example of where foliage snared my eye more than flowers:

If the snow comes late, tulip foliage makes wiggily green waves on the white:

This spring, try keeping an eye on all tulips have to offer, right from the first sprout. That way you can prolong garden pleasure without extra work: just put your attention in the right place.

I’ll be writing about one way to preserve tulip foliage from pests soon - but before that, we’re going to have another letter from Sylvia, about a different kind of foliage plant.

Last month, Sylvia (from England) revealed the winter flowers of her garden. When I found a flower on my ‘Freckles’ clematis one morning, I decided to follow her lead. To me, it’s amazing to find things flowering when, every night, I am draining my pipes so they won’t freeze.

‘Freckles’ (a Clematis cirrhosa cultivar) is pictured at the top. I wrote about it earlier this year, describing it as a winter-flowering clematis. I didn’t know how right I was. Since it’s a selection from the Beleares, where they don’t have much frost, or may not have any: huge, old bearing fig trees are common, some of the rosemary grows well over your head, and almonds have green fruit in March), I thought this clematis would shut down for business once the weather got really cold. It hasn’t. Not only have I got this flower, the leaves are still fresh and green.

All pretty sparse, as you can see, but I’ve had this clematis for less than a year. Can’t wait to see what it does next winter.

Another flower that is gracing my doorstep is the ever-beautiful Iris danfordiae. A small iris, all head and no stem, it has a fresh mild fragrance which you can enjoy more of in the house. I put Iris danfordiae in shotglasses or tiny jars, one or two at a time; they last for a few days. I like to put them someplace handy, like the kitchen table, so I can lift the whole bright nosegay up and sniff it for refreshment. They’re also great for sickrooms, because they’re small enough not to take much room on the bedside table, low enough that someone lying down can really see them, and easy to sniff from a prone position.

Those of us who plant bulbs in containers can bring these treats up close, where we  can see (and smell) every bit of drama as they unfold. Since no porch is big enough to hold all the plants I want to have close to me, I like getting to rotate plants in their prime so that they’re nearer to me. It helps that I plant bulbs in lightweight fiber pots, easier to schlep.

Iris danfordiae has always been an annual for me, but this time may be different. In Janis Ruksans’s well-named book Buried Treasures, I found a possible cure. Ruksans (his name is spelled incorrectly, as I don’t have diacritics in WP –if anyone knows of how to do them, I’d be grateful to know) – Ruksans tells of how I. danfordiae tends to split into tiny grains after flowering. This would explain the disappearance of my bulbs. His solution is to give them a good dose of fertilizer and plant them more deeply, 15-20 cm (about 8 inches), about twice as deep as you’d ordinarily plan a bulb this size.

So I planted my Iris danfordiae deep this year, and next year will tell if that tactic works in my area and in pots.

Violets are great in containers, forming a kind of miniature groundcover which allows other plants to grow through later in the season. Right now, they’re in their own,  coming out in strength. This unnamed passalong variety I got from the yard of my friend and former bandmate, Dan Scanlan. He lives in a twenties-era house which has a lot of plants from the old garden in it, including these violets. When our band rehearsed in his garage, these violets scented the entryway every February. I remarked on them so much that he gave me a few clumps.

I’m fascinated by violet varieties and history – at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were the most popular cut flowers in the U.S.  I’ve bought fancier named varieties, in search of exotic beauties – but this nameless Viola odorata, living on in abandoned homesites and old gardens around our county,  is the one I keep liking the best.

The final flower – and I do mean ONE flower – is even more common than the violets. For some reason, one of my Dutch Master daffodil pots is far in advance of the others. I can’t think why; I planted them all last year (usually, an old, established pot will bloom before a just-planted-this-fall one). And they were all pretty much in the same place, so none got more sun exposure than another. Just another of the mysteries of garden life.

Dutch Master is a common hybrid: too old to be new and different, to young to be antique. Yet when it is blooming on my doorstep in winter, it’s not common at all.
Next post: A letter from Sylvia. All about hellebores.

It’s the time of year when plants are dead, dormant, or dying: dropping leaves, shriveling up, slumping to the ground. At least they are if you’re north of the equator.

But all year, if you look for it, there are signs of death in life, as well as the other way around. I look for them, for I find a strange, guilty pleasure in the beauties of death and dying.

I take photos of what I see, and since I take hundreds of photos (oh, the greatness of digital cameras: I don’t have to feel guilty about wasting film, or the poison chemicals it will take to process it)—since I take hundreds of photos, some of them turn out almost like what I was looking at, or, if I’m really lucky, like what I was feeling as I looked. I keep them. (To be honest, I also keep a lot of others; it’s a great way to learn how not to make a picture.)

In this post, I’m showing a few of the photos I’ve made on the beauties of death. As the number after the title hints, this isn’t going to be the last of this.

I know I’m not the only one who values the beauty in death: besides the fact that I’m not megalomaniac enough to think I’m that unique, I’ve seen some incredible photos on the subject, on the web and off.  I’d be interested to hear of others’ transcendent moments with death, and maybe even do a guest post of photos, if there’s an interest. To me, the amazing thing is that, no matter how many people take (or paint) a picture of the same thing, any honest pictures will be fresh. No one sees things quite the same way.