Category Archives: Flowers

It’s too early to hear it, and until this week we’ve had no real reason to miss it, but when those icy winds started wailing again, I realized that whatever faint whisper of spring had sounded in my ear was gone. Our traditional January thaw took place for much of the first half of the month, so it would be greedy to expect anything like that now. Despite this, the heart longs for that glorious time of the year when we turn the corner from winter. It’s quite a way off, but today marks one month of winter done. We are a third of the way there, and the days are getting longer.

In celebration of that mini-milestone, here are a few spring-hued flowers that stood pretty sentinel in the lobby of the Taj Hotel on my last visit to Boston. These are parrot tulips, in cream and chartreuse – the simplicity of the color scheme given frilly life by the architectural form of the flower petals. I’ve never grown these myself – they always seemed more suited to cut-flower schemes, and in a yard as limited as ours there is simply no room for such an extravagance. Besides, they’re just the slightest bit too fancy for my taste, which makes them perfectly suited for an elegantly old-school hotel lobby.

The 60-degree weather we’ve had of late is nice, but disturbing. I fear for the buds that have appeared on the cherries and hydrangeas – all will be decimated once the customary winter hits. In the meantime, however, roses still bloom and fall-colored leaves still dangle. There is something fun about that, some way-late-season celebratory spark that accompanies the disorienting notion of roses in December.

These pink beauties were smiling at me from the Southwest Corridor Park the last time I was in Boston. I paused to snap a few photos, while another on-looker marveled at them too. She said they were almost like holiday decorations.

Such extremes are indications of global warming and climate change, so the sight of these beautiful roses comes with certain consternation. As much as I enjoy the reprieve from the cruelty of winter, I also know the importance of a steady frozen groundwork for the survival and well-being of plants in the Northeast. Beauty and relief today may spell disaster for tomorrow. I’d rather go through the ritual and pay the dues now.

That said, these roses are indeed beautiful, and their incongruent appearance in the last month of the year shall be taken as a blessing. Maybe the winter won’t be so bad. Even if it is, the memory of beauty lingers, the feeling resulting from warm sunlight in December remains.

It’s one of the sadder sights to see – these last few blooms of the season. They will linger well into October – and if the frosts are late and benign, perhaps even November. (One year I recall roses that were blooming in the first dusting of snow.) For now, I don’t want to even think of the f-word, so these photos of summer annuals at the tail-end of their glory will be posted for posterity, and in the hope that the sunny weather sticks around for as long as possible.

Most of the annuals have given up by now, trailing into leggy, spindly form, with perhaps a less showy, but somehow richer for it, showing before the fall takes them for good.

You’ve seen them everywhere, but probably never gave much thought or notice to them. They’re there when you arrive, and there when you leave, and they share your most intimate restaurant moments: listening in, nodding their pretty little heads, and remaining absolutely mum long after you’ve departed with your dishy dining mate. They are the little bouquets of flowers that adorn many restaurant tables. Generally made up of a single rose or, far worse, some carnations or alstroemeria, they more often than not strike me as sad and failed attempts at bringing the idea of beauty into an eating space, while not actually providing any.

Occasionally, though, they do work, and mostly by accident. When the happy coupling such as the one featured here occurs, my heart gets a little giddy – as much for the perfection and simplicity of such beauty as for the unexpected nature of the chance encounter. We get so little, sometimes, that when it’s there, even in the tiniest of bouquets, it means something more.

These are from the Columbus Avenue location of House of Siam, where the goodness of the Thai dishes is just as vibrant and delicious as this little floral grouping.

Sometimes the sun comes up from the ground,

in the circular bloom of a Black-eyed Susan,

or the saucer-like blossom of the cup plant.

The super-saturated yellow lit from behind,

standing up to the heat of the day

without wilt or complaint.

It is the embodiment of summer,

of sun and heat and a season of growth.

It is a celebration.

Happiness is a flower in the sunlight.

Happiness is a summer day.

Happiness is the month of August.

The stunning simplicity of a flower that echoes the sun,

backed and buoyed by the green of sustenance and life,

will always be a wonder to behold.

The heart bursts with joy

at these explosions of a summer

that’s not quite ready to give up.

Named rather obviously, if whimsically, for Queen Ann’s Lace, these tenacious wildflowers were a little too hardy and invasive for me to quite embrace as a child, but I’m coming around to them. In the Northeast, they are troopers in the extremes of weather we get here, surviving the winters with a long tap root and a hardiness at odds with their delicate appearance. I always knew of their survival instincts, I even saw them laugh in the face of fire.

In the fall of that year, a dried bouquet of seeds, intact in the skeletal umbrel of the flowerhead, had made its way into our garden, where it became brittle and bone dry. It was an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt at transplanting one from the wild. As a rather dangerous experiment in easier brush removal, I lit one of them on fire, watching the seeds explode and disperse and then forgetting about them over winter. The next spring, a mass of fernlike seedlings had cropped up in the area, more than I have ever gotten when intentionally tending patches of perfectly-planted seeds. I knew then that this queen was far from fragile.

She is a signifier of summer, standing up to the most oppressive heat in the road-side stretches she favors. She also makes a decent cut flower, although when picked at high heat of day, she sometimes tend to droop, and may never recover. As with many things, timing is crucial. Earliest morning, preferably after a few days of restorative rain, is the ideal window.

The cream-colored lace, and soft green foliage, reminds me of summer. As heat-horny insects buzzed in hidden leafy canopies, and the sun moved directly overhead, the lace remained refined and elegant. It nodded its floriferous carriage, held stalwart in the face of strong winds and rains, and perhaps its very airy nature allowed it to deal with forces that would have crushed more solid floral forms. The lace of a queen sometimes needs to be as strong as it is pretty.

For many years, I eschewed white flowers. Too bland, too boring, too dull, too whatever – I always felt they were less exciting than their more colorful counterparts. Why choose white when you could have a bright fiery red? As time has gone on, however, I’ve traded in the need for bold pizazz and find myself enjoying the softness of the palest of shades. Here’s a brief, and eclectic, collection of white flowers. They run the gamut from the earliest trillium to the season-ending anemone. I like being smack-dab in the middle of them.

From a furry gray-green rosette comes these shooting stars of magenta. A variety of Lychnis, these hardy little performers are prolific re-seeders, with poppy-like seedpods that act as miniature salt-and-pepper shakers, dispersing their seeds generously. As biennials, they produce a mound of soft foliage the first year, then send up these powerful bursts of saturated blooms in their second. While I’m not enamored of their spindly form, I am in absolute love with their blazing color. Not many flowers match this sort of intensity, and despite their small size the sheer volume of the hue is turned up so high it can be seen from across the yard. Sometimes little things pack a powerful punch, and at the time of the year when a number of flowers are jockeying for the spotlight, this little lychnis manages to steal the show.

Reminiscent of sherbet or sorbet in shade only, this tree peony bloom actually smells of a spicy tea. Though the scale of the flower is unknown in these shots, it’s immense – the size of a small plate. So big is it that the stems don’t practically support its weight. I always end up clipping the blooms and bringing them inside, where the pungent perfume can be enjoyed up close.

The bloom is an ever-changing and evolving show of its own. Just when you think it’s achieved its full bomb size, it reaches a little higher and expands a little wider, revealing an inner shade of ruby red at the throat of each petal. I love a hidden heart.