Category — Flower admiration

  The point of putting evergreens around, this time of year, is to remind us of spring to come: that the snow and dark may put us into temporary dormancy, but life will renew itself. 

In more modern times, since we’ve had heated houses, greenhouses, and fast transportation, we’ve dreamed up more elaborate ways of showing ourselves that there is hope  of more expansive days to come: if we have enough money, we can pretty much have any flower we want, in any season. 

But hothouse flowers, while lush and beautiful, don’t give me the refreshment I get from those simple plants whose ancestors have been providing that little adrenaline rush to people for millenia. 

A lot of those flowers that last through snowy weather are bulbs, so of course I’m going to write about them. But the violets at the top of the page not only lasted through snow, but went on to bloom for weeks more (I’m pretty sure they’re a sport of an old variety I dug up at a friend’s house). And one of those durable bulbs I was so hopeful about, Fritillaria persica, looked as if it was doing well in the snow

but future events showed differently. I was so disappointed. I have never gotten Fritillaria persica to flower yet.

 On the other hand, some bulbs are designed for snow, as this daffodil (an anonymous daffodil from a big cheap bag at my hardward store, probably the ubiquitous ‘Dutch Master’).

 While this modern daffodil is bigger than its ancestors, they share the deep tube that keeps its sexual parts safe and sheltered – so, should a pollinator be abroad on a snowy day, it will find shelter. You can see that even though this daffodil is tattered by weather, once the pollination has been carried out, the seeds can still develop in their cozy (relatively) little incubator-trumpet. 

These small Tulipa turkestanica are another plant that was made to take the snow. They come from the high mountain passes of  the Turkestan mountains, in Central Asia. I suspect, as in my own mountains, they get sudden dumps of spring snow.

  One of the big problems with those spring frosts and snows is that they kill fruit tree flowers at a crucial time (fruit trees don’t have those nice protected pollinating spots that daffodils do; too bad). This flowering plum (which gives excellent, red, cherry-size plums in season) looks happy here. But we had snow after this picture was taken, and all our fruit was really expensive, because there wasn’t much of it.

 You can always count on crocus, though, which originated in the same high mountains as Tulipa turkestanica.

 Like the ‘Gypsy Girl’ crocus,  this iris x histrioides ‘Katherine Hodgkins’  might be unrecognizable to its ancestors, but it still keeps its resilience to snow. 

 I’d be curious to know of other people’s favorite plants that flower in snow. 

Surely Breck enjoyed the fan-play of hyacinth foliage…

They don’t write books like they used to.

  ”Let us learn another lesson from the lily of the field. How small a portion of its exquisite beauty is within the reach of our vision. Look with a true heart and a loving spirit, study its wondrous mechanism, its faultless form, seek for the secret of its ‘tender grace,’ and when you have read all that eye can see, and have felt all that heart can receive, remember that you know but in part, that you see the beauty of this flower only through a glass darkly. It has a wealth of beauty that to you is entirely imperceptible.” 

…and the first violets poking through snow and leaves 

 That’s from Breck’s New Book of Flowers, written in 1866, when Joseph Breck was 70.  Not only does he take some pages to discuss the spiritual value of flowers, he takes even more to describe how every child will benefit from growing flowers, and how, for a person in declining years, gardening is the perfect exercise.

He goes on to paint a portrait of his dead mother:  how she grew, gathered, and had flowers around the house. ”With tender emotions do I remember the old white rose-bush, trained up to the top of the house by the hand of a dear mother, the abundant and fragrant flowers of which gave delight to all the household as well as to the neighbors, who received them as expresions of neighborly friendship and good-will.” (If you’d like to read the full text, you can find it at google books.) 

As the founder of one of our most famous U.S. bulb catalogues, Breck must have enjoyed the unfurling of a tulip bud as much as I (although the bud, and the tulip, would have been smaller than this one)

While no one would write in such a florid style now, many gardening books and articles include childhood garden inspirations, and descriptions of the generous spirit plants often seem to nurture in gardeners. (I can’t help wondering what that fragrant white rose would have been, though. Perhaps a white damask of some type? Or maybe it was an alba, which would be appropriate.)

 What interests me is that, these days, the memoir and the paeon to the joys of plants would probably not be in a book of practical instruction. Or at least it wouldn’t take the first few chapters, and be interlarded with the practical instruction that followed. I’m not sure this means we’ve gone forward in the world of garden writing; I think it’s more a case of pressing forward in the world of book marketing.

The incredibly fragrant ‘Painted Lady’ sweet pea was known in England in the late 1700s, so Breck would have been familiar with it 

  And, speaking of marketing, by the time Breck was writing, he was living in the same breathless pace of plant fashion we know today. “Time makes great changes in all the pursuits of life, and in none more than it has in Floriculture in the last 15 years..” he says, giving the reason why he’s writing the new edition, and not even bothering to amend his old flower book. Which is to say a lot of new plants had come into style, and a lot of old ones had been relegated to the back of the catalogue, or been cut out of it entirely. 

“There is a fashion among amateurs of the floral kingdom…thus, when  new flower of fancied merit is introduced, it becomes all the rage, for the time being,” Breck writes knowingly. 

Species nicotiana were popular Victorian flowers. The species names were different, though. The Nicotiana longiflora in Breck’s book is probably N. sylvestris. The flower above is N. alata. 

Ignorance is another gardening trait which hasn’t changed over the years. In the section where he discusses seed vitality, Breck tells a story about a Maine farmer who sent him a potato which, he insisted, had grown on the roots of a Gilly-Flower (carnation, or pink; it’s a corruption of “July-flower”). Breck feels called upon to tell this story because, despite all Breck’s careful explanations, the farmer was firmly convinced that a potato could be bred with a Gilly-flower, and he wouldn’t budge from his story.  (Of course these days that farmer could breed a potato with a fish, if he were talented at genetics.)

  Are there still people out there who believe a potato could grow from carnation roots? Well, judging by the ads for Giant Tomato Trees and Giant Bluberries, which I’ve been seeing for the last 20 years, credulity still seems to be a part of horticultural life.

  And judging by location-establishing shots that have roses blooming all year round in Washington, D.C.  (a popular TV show which shall remain nameless), we are probably no better educated than Breck’s farmer audiences. Possibly less: most of us don’t have the daily experience of nature and its vagaries firshand. 

‘Invasion’ tulips doing the dance of death on my porch

There are many kinds of death.

Flamboyant – -

 Curious, with connections still unmade

 Blazing in glory:

 …and  letting the dying embers glow:

It can be simple, almost innocent

…or replete with the fulfillment of a life well lived, a legacy left.

And sometimes, in the face of death, life becomes transparent.

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: