A Walker in the Suburbs

Peonies have been in beautiful bloom the last week or two. I’ve admired them in neighbor’s yards and on my table, a gift from my daughter’s new garden.

My peony harvest is much smaller: it’s an “on” year for the single peony plant in my backyard. A plant that has never thrived but also never died. Some years it produces one flower, some years none. It’s long since been surrounded by day lilies and iris, so there’s no room for it to roam, not that peonies spread much anyway.

This year it seems like a tease … or an invitation. Plant more of me, it says. Find a deer-safe patch of soil and create some more of my kind. It’s lonely out here.

Yes, I know, May Day was yesterday, but it was also yesterday that I learned about a sweet tradition that used to accompany it. Neighbors would pick wild flowers and leave them (sometimes in decorated baskets) on their neighbor’s front porch. In some places the tradition was to shout “May basket,” then run away before the recipient saw you.

This flower exchange is akin to dancing around the Maypole or crowning a May king and queen, ancient practices that celebrate the arrival of spring. Very Thomas Hardy, if you ask me: quaffing mead and cavorting on the square of some remote Wessex village.

But not that remote, after all: a tradition enjoyed by a friend of mine, which is how I learned about it in the best and most traditional way of all, face-to-face conversation.

For the last few years, bluebell-viewing has been high on my spring to-do list. This year I worried I’d missed the flowers. Friends had traveled to prime spots and reported peak bloom. But by Saturday afternoon, with studies and errands out of the way, a chunk of time materialized. The weather was iffy — leftover clouds and sprinkles from Friday’s deluge — but I hoped that would keep the crowds at bay.

Riverbend Park is only 30 minutes away, but it’s another world. Unlike Seneca Park, where I’d seen bluebells other years, at Riverbend the Potomac is front and center: a dramatic backdrop for the delicate blooms. We walked a mile or so upriver — and bluebells were with us all the way. A profusion, a wonderment.

It’s one thing to witness beauty, to stare at it and soak it in. It’s another thing to walk through it. Movement heightens the experience, doubles and triples it. That’s how it was with the bluebells at Riverbend.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a professor that began with mulch. The topics were thesis requirements and process; that it started with mulch says something about the season and the suburbs.

Every year this time I notice the bags piled neatly waiting to be spread. They speak of industry, of the gardener’s hope that this year she will prevail over weeds.

And then… the gardener weeds the garden before spreading the mulch. What does she find? Wild onions, wild strawberry vines, a weed with a tall stem and shaggy “leaves” that spreads its seeds throughout the yard whenever it’s touched.

Most ugly of all is the sticker vine, or at least that’s what I call it. It’s a tenacious creature that doesn’t want to give up its privileged place near the garden fence, has already began climbing it, asserting dominance. It took all my strength to pull that one from the ground.

Most of the mulch is still in bags. But at least the weeds are on the run.

(In July the garden will already be shaggy, but traces of mulch are still visible.)

Resistance is futile. When D.C.’s Tidal Basin cherry blossoms are in peak bloom, I want to see them. So I trundled downtown yesterday on Metro and caught the seasonal display, slightly less robust than usual due to seawall construction.

What always strikes me on these pilgrimages is not the flowers but the people. I heard dozens of languages, dodged scores of photographers, reminded myself over and over again, it’s the journey not the destination.

Summery temperatures are making quick work of the fragile flowers this year. Thunderstorms moved in last night; the wind was already picking up when I was there. I tried to snap a shot of the pink petals flying, but they proved elusive. If you look closely at the photo above, though, you’ll see them. No fooling!