Category Archives: Flowers

Suzie’s childhood home had grand swaths of these little spring bulbs growing wild at the edge of their property. One Easter Sunday we found ourselves out in the midst of their bloom and it was a sight redolent of spring in its purest form. Their size is such that they require a mass planting to make much of an impact, but when examined up close, just one bloom is a thing of beauty. A lesson that sometimes it’s worth taking a closer look at the world around us. There is so much that’s so easy to miss.

The advantage that this particular bulb has is its right-out-of-the-starting-gate blooming time. Starved for the least sign of life, an actual bloom this early in the season gets roundly celebrated, the hype and hoopla in exact antithesis of its size and eventual impact. In just a month or two it will be all but forgotten, its green straps of leaves tattered and expiring even as they provide the juice and sustenance for next year’s bloom. Nature is ruthless that way, and we would do well to learn by her example. Celebrate the moment at hand. Nothing lasts forever, especially not spring. Though it will come back again…

My love affair with the Beekman Boys continues, as their recent re-release of a former favorite – Aloe and Iris – arrived on my doorstep the other day. Iris is a tricky scent to isolate and convey through soap or toiletries. I’ve yet to find a cologne or perfume that does justice to the spicy, complex floral of a proper bearded iris. With that said, I wasn’t expecting much from my first brush with Aloe & Iris, but I was pleasantly surprised to find my naked, shower-soaked self brought instantly back to a garden in some splendid June day of my childhood. While the Beekman Boys version doesn’t reek of iris in perfect imitation, it carries enough of the notes to conjure that beautiful flower, and in the midst of my evening shower I was instantly transported to a very specific and happy moment of childhood.

I remember only the setting quite clearly. It was the somewhat hidden side-yard garden of Suzie’s house. T0 be honest, I don’t even remember Suzie being there, and if history is any indication, she probably wasn’t. We were raised like sibiings, so when one or the other of us got tired of the other one, we would simply walk somewhere else and go about our day. In one of the enduring hallmarks of our friendship, we could do that without hard feelings or questions.

On that particular day, I recall making my way down the crumbling set of stones that made for a rather rustic staircase leading from the driveway to the lower side yard. Swaths of blooming purple centaurea stretched out on either side of the bank, turning their heads up at the bright midday sun, enjoying the heat as much as the bees that were buzzing about them. Their fragrance was sweet, but it wasn’t the fix I was after.

After carefully climbing down the jagged stairs, I paused before stepping onto a stone path. The Ko house was always a magical place for me, and I stood there taking in all the beauty of a sunny almost-summer day. The gentle hum of bees was the only sound being made. There was warmth but my childhood self was too young to be bothered much by heat yet. Besides, there was a great elm just ahead that offered shade, and an arbor thick with a canopy of grape vines.

I took a few more steps and the bed of bearded iris was before me, rising almost up to my unimpressive height. I could simply lean forward and inhale their spicy perfume, and closely examine the beautiful beards of gold and yellow so brilliantly complementing hoods of purple and burgundy. It was, and remains, a fragrance idyllic and emblematic of summer – and to this day that memory can be conjured even in the unlikely setting of an indulgent shower.

It set off a ripple effect of memories – the beds of peonies, the sun-dial pedestal, a circular path bordered by hostas, and a hidden clump of mockorange unseen, but whose sweet perfume carried in the hot, humid air. Fragrance and memory can be beautifully intertwined.

It came earlier than usual, and perhaps that’s best. Just as we may all be hunkering down for isolation and social distancing, the season of freedom and rebirth has arrived in the nick of time. There will be much work to be done outside in the yard and garden, and I’m anxious to get started. If the weather cooperates, the main yard clean-up will commence shortly. I’ve already procured 40 lawn bags for the undertaking ~ that’s generally the number I fill each year at this time. Some things are still on schedule and going according to loose plan.

It doesn’t really feel like spring though. We cannot deny the darkness that has seeped into our daily lives, and looking at things through rose-tinted glasses has never been my modus operandi. For now, we’ll simply look at yellow roses and hope that eases the tension and worry. I’ve always counted on beauty to act as a balm upon the anxious mind. Working in the garden helps too, and my general countenance has been a wee bit calmer since I started daily meditation. An ancient adage that people repeat in moments of crisis has been, “May you live in interesting times.” I’ve always hated that saying, and its requisite connotations. I do NOT want to live in interesting times. If I need interest, I’ll create my own. Hell, I’ll create yours. I do not like interest to be forced upon me. Yet here we are, and there’s not much we can do to change the interesting times in which we live. All we can do is meet the next minute with our chosen mindset, focusing on what we need to do to get through it. For now, I choose to look at these yellow roses, to inhale their faint perfume, to sit with myself in a little window of quiet. There is beauty and peace here. There is spring, too.

We need some saturated color more than ever these days, as we exit this dull winter and do our best to deal with a world that seems to have gone completely mad. Personally, I prefer my drama to be in the form of plants like these, the excitement of a vibrant blossom or a transfixing architectural detail of a bromeliad. When seeking a happy place, I first look to nature. ‘As it was in the beginning’ is often the best space to make a home-base.

A lot of us may be going a little stir-crazy, whether from being house-bound or the typical end-of-winter doldrums. I’m more in the latter camp than the former, as I don’t mind hanging around the home, but I’m antsy to get outside and watch the world turn green again. 

This is when it helps to have a local greenhouse such as Faddegon’s nearby to bring some of the spring and summer indoors throughout the entire year. Stopping by to browse their wares has become my Saturday morning ritual during these winter months, and it’s been a lifesaver. 

I’ve noticed a reinvigorated burst in the growth of our houseplants lately too, which means that spring is indeed on the way. The brown turkey fig tree that’s been overwintering in our unheated garage is bursting with new leaves, just waiting for the days to get a bit warmer. 

Help is on the way, dahlings.

One of my Mom’s friends – the woman who taught me how to force paper white narcissus – had a small collection of African violets that she grew on her kitchen windsill, where they enjoyed the humidity from the nearby kitchen sink. I’ve never gotten into these beautiful little plants, despite the success that some have rightly proclaimed over the years (I’ve seen FaceBook evidence of their recurring blooms). They have sensitive leaves and stems that do not like touching the rim of a clay pot, or the feel of cold water, which will leave spots on their furry leaves. (As a general rule, most fuzzy leaves don’t enjoy water on them. Think cats.) 

While I don’t have time for that kind of temperamental care, I do enjoy seeing these at greenhouses and other homes. They offer cheery bursts of color, set off by darkly gorgeous, velvet-like foliage, giving off a very welcome tropical vibe at this icy time of the year. 

Roses signify many things:

Romance.

Love.

Forgiveness. 

Celebration. 

And sometimes they don’t signify anything more than brightening up a week in winter. The world needs more roses at these times. Beauty will always make things better. 

This bouquet is comprised of some dark pink spray roses and a few traditional long-stemmed pink roses. As we get closer to Valentine’s Day, their cost will become ridiculously prohibitive. For now, they brighten our home, nestled lovingly in a favorite vase, gradually opening and becoming the blooms they have aspired to be. 

Oh magnificent amaryllis! How you stun with your saturated redness, how you thrill with your scarlet bloom! From such a plain bulb of brown, how gloriously you burst forth with your floral explosion, followed by straps of vivid green leaves. You are life and beauty and power in a world sick with mundane mediocrity. You give me hope. You give me pleasure. You give me prettiness in the midst of a bleak day. What price on such a piece? What bounty on such a head?

It is enough simply to exist when you are so richly red.

This post is enough to supply the day with the magic it wants. 

Once upon such posts populated this blog, providing a brief haven for those who deigned to visit, a quick little respite while a cup of coffee or tea was had before the workday began in earnest. A return to the simple and the true. A return to beauty. 

Every winter comes with its own set of hardships and difficulties. Following the Christmas bonhomie there is often a let-down and a few weeks of despondent regret, when recent excesses are suddenly regrettable with the arrival of credit car statements and such. The weather of late has been a bit of a roller coaster, with temperatures that have swung from the 60’s to the 20’s in a few quick days. Not ideal for the seasonally affected among us, but we must trudge on. One of the ways I make it through the winter wilderness is by making weekly pilgrimages to Faddegon’s Nursery. When the nearest botanical garden is hundreds of miles away, it’s what you have to do. 

Luckily, plants are plants, flowers are flowers, and beauty may be found in a local greenhouse. I still remember a little gift shop in Chicago, during a rather cold and trying winter, and one of its rooms was a tiny corner made mostly of windows, where the light, gray and dim as it was, filled the space. A few pots of paper white narcissus bloomed and scattered their divisive perfume in the air, while pretty scenes made up of up cycled metal and wood, along with a few other touches of green foliage, made for an impressive respite. I was having a difficult day, but this brief brush with beauty calmed the turbulence of my heart, and I clung to whatever balm I could find. 

That same sense of peace, however fleeting or momentary, is what I try to capture during the winter. It eases the soul when the outside wind bangs and rages. Our houses can only barricade us from so much, eventually some of the winter will seep in. Beauty, however, is impenetrable. Its essence goes right to the soul and cannot be felled or destroyed, no matter how strong the gusts of wind or how high the fall of snow. 

I felt such power the last time I was at Faddegon’s. It started in the face of a Lenten rose, careened off the curves of a pink spath, and winked at me from the gorgeous painted plate of this orchid. In the tranquil stillness of a greenhouse, where the only sounds came from the distant hum of a fan and the dripping of a recent spray of water, there was peace to be found in the winter. Peace and beauty, and for one moment all was right with the world. 

She’s a real Thanksgiving cactus this year, opening her hot pink blooms for the holiday of gratitude, just as the world turns gray and brown. She’s put on a show before – quite a few in fact, when you consider that I’ve had her since about 2002. A gift from a co-worker, she was a tiny little thing that I shoved in the guest/storage room and basically forgot about over the years. That may have done her more good than harm, as overwatering these plants is their number one cause of death and distress. 

Over the years, I potted her up, trimmed her down, and did my best to coddle her once I saw her resilience and perennial beauty at this time of the year. It’s as if she sensed the most dismal and dark time of the year and decided to gift us a balm of beauty and bright color. There have been some rough patches along there way – recently, after upgrading her into a larger clay pot, she showed a flush of new growth, then suddenly lost one of her main stalks, reducing her structure by a good third, without reason or explanation. Since then, she’s slowly rebuilt herself, and this year’s crop of blooms is a fine one. A pleasant reminder that life is not about perfection, but the growth it takes to attempt it. 

The world doesn’t give the asters their proper and deserved due. Maybe, like me, too many people have written off flowers by this point in the seasonal year. I’m guilty of that, guilty of ending things too quickly when we might draw out their beauty a little while longer. It’s like the last day of a vacation – I want to get going and get home as early a possible so I can reacclimatize myself to the mundane before the cold, dark dunk of a work week begins again. There’s something to be said for that. It eases the shock of a Monday for me. But perhaps there’s something to extending pleasure and beauty for as long as possible. 

Maybe that’s the lesson of these pretty little faces. Give it up for the asters. Give it up for the fall. Give it up for the people who want to make the good times last. 

(And let me give up on the goddamn beer commercial I just wrote here.)

September roses mean more. To begin with, they are so much rarer than roses in June, which overflow from every corner and every garden. In September, a rose is often a singular thing, popping up unexpectedly in some late-season second-showing, usually smaller but somehow richer of color than its high summer brethren. September roses remind me of the delicate preciousness of life, something we might forget in the riotous sunny tumult of summer, when the rambunctious growth of a garden goes on untethered and unchecked. By this time of the year, I want to cut it all back, to start again in the way only a spell of winter can provide.

OH, IT’S A LONG, LONG WHILE FROM MAY TO DECEMBER
AND THE DAYS GROW SHORT WHEN YOU REACH SEPTEMBER
THE AUTUMN WEATHER TURNS THE LEAVES TO FLAME
AND I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THE WAITING GAME

Perhaps you’re thinking it’s much too soon to use the threat of winter. And perhaps you’re right. There’s so much fall first. Beautiful, fleeting, heartbreaking fall, captured in a song with a tinge of sadness, a tinge of September. The blush of a rose is less bashful now. We’ve already taken our clothes off.

OH, THE DAYS DWINDLE DOWN TO A PRECIOUS FEW
SEPTEMBER, NOVEMBER
AND THESE FEW PRECIOUS DAYS I’LL SPEND WITH YOU
THESE PRECIOUS DAYS I’LL SPEND WITH YOU.

The garden moves in cycles – drifts and bounty one week, droughts and drawbacks the next – and it ebbs and flows like so much of life. If you’ve come to gardening seeking perfect satisfaction, precise schedules, and predictable outcomes, you are probably in the wrong hobby. That said, there are incredibly consistent things, even when growing seasons start in cold and wet fashion, as this spring did. Nature caught up to herself and things are generally on their usual track.

At around this time, there is usually the first of what will be several lulls in flowering sessions. We had a nice long extended first flush of floral fireworks, aided and abetted by the cool and moist weather. That soon subsided for a stretch of hot and dry days, and it’s that which brings about a floral lull. The trick to getting through it and maintaining color throughout the season (if such is your wish) is to supplement a garden with annuals or long-blooming perennials. Rudbeckia and echinacea work wonderfully for this. Our cup plants have a pretty lengthy showing as well. Hydrangeas, particularly the ones that bloom on new wood as well as old, also throw off flowers pretty regularly. These are the backbone champions that see the garden through the tough high-heat/high-sun times.

Personally, I’m grateful and appreciate these little lulls. They are a pause in the boisterous riot of color the summer season produces, a chance to ease the eyes with the sumptuousness of green before it begins to yellow and brown off. That’s why I rarely bother with annuals. I don’t need the constant cacophony of blooms to reveal the beauty of the garden. It’s there in its structure, in its leafy canopies, in the long-forming buds of the sedum or the fountain-like grace of the grasses. A summer lull is a pleasant reminder that it is, still, summer.

Goody goody gumdrops.

Tikki tikki tembo…

Sometimes summer is just one long and crazy rhyming scheme, a waking dream, or a popsicle of cream. A time to be silly, and willy-nilly, and pic-a-dilly. There’s no need to be serious when the times are so delirious. Go to the ends of the earth to find a Friendly’s with a Fribbler. Don’t be such a quibbler! Oh dear, my mind is fried. No fear, my hands aren’t tied. My rear, time will bide.

Soon the summer vines will take a stranglehold, becoming too much to do anything aboutuntil next year. These little sundrops are a reminder that it’s still the time to be frivolous and silly. We can return to our profound posture come fall, and it’s coming sooner than we want or realize. Enough of that pish-posh. We came here to play.

Summer is the time for sun and fun, where the only thing to be done is plotting out the trajectory of a walk or bike-ride. Where the meals are heavy on fresh vegetables and fruit, seasoned with whatever the garden is pushing up, where the glasses of water are tall and sweating, where everything slows down and sighs of contentment are plentiful. We have arrived. Enjoy the moment.

If you look closely enough, and are as obsessed with color as I am, you may notice that each photo here makes it look like a slightly different shade of pink. Part of me abhors such inconsistency, and part of me lives for it. The part that loves it is winning out because I’m filling the space in between the picture with words.

It’s like the tricks you can play with your belt and shoes. The break of your legs is just enough to make shades that aren’t quite the same when viewed next to each other work perfectly together when far enough apart. There’s a metaphor for life somewhere in this. Find it, because I’m in no mood to explain.

As for these little petunias, they share one of my favorite color combinations: outer petals of hot pink and deep throats of chartreuse. They are so bright and cheery I defy you not to be made a little happier by seeing them. (If you’re successful, I don’t want to hear about it. The person that finds a way to shit on the happiness of others is the person who has no place in my life.)

Whoa, that went a little too deep a little too quickly. [Shrugs.]

The simple but potent beauty of a flower.

The way some openly smile, the way some blush,

the way some take their time, the way some rush.

A flower is reason enough for a party.

A flower is reason enough for a thrill.

We bloom and we bloom,

and we stave off the doom.

At the end of it all

If we’re lucky we zoom

to the high crest of the thing, to the ridge of the petals,

to the beard of an iris or the prick of a nettle.

Another story is about to be told

and the language of flowers is sometimes secret.

In whispered dew drops

Invisible perfume

In lace-caps and umbrels

Leaves pointed and smooth

An army of thorns

Bitter sting of a vine

Sweet fragrance entwined

The garden untamed,

the garden unclaimed

leave nothing unnamed

leave nothing unblamed

Marry antique roses

To wise, merry lavender

Floral mingling

Pungent tingling

The kind of mid-afternoon

Mid-summer

Ripe for a Flower Party…