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Category: flowers

Complementary

Complementary


I’ve never considered myself a color expert, a landscape designer or, heaven forbid, an interior decorator. But I know what I like about color. It’s the contrast, the way one end of the wheel brings out the other.

It’s the profusion of complementary shades in the summer garden. Our neighbor’s, for instance (not pictured here; this is ours), with tall zinnias of yellow, orange and pink all mixed in with the sturdy dusky rose coneflowers.

As for us, we’ve had orange day lilies, yellow black-eyed susans and pink coneflowers all together, and, if you look at them from the right angle, you can see a purple hydrangea in the foreground, too. These bright mingling hues are enough for now. They are meant to go together; they are pleasant on the eyes.

Park Bench in Spring

Park Bench in Spring


Yesterday I went to see the cherry blossoms at the tidal basin. It was a fresh, just-drenched morning with a bar rainbow (looking like a colorful UPC code) in the sky above National Airport. There were low clouds and intermittent rain.

The blossoms were past peak, so I had them (almost) to myself. Pink petals piled on the pavement, clung to tree bark, dotted park benches. It was a pointillistic paradise. The beauty was still there; it was just broken and scattered.

Perfect Timing

Perfect Timing


Now that my blog is in its second year I sometimes worry that I will repeat myself, write the same post on the same day. After all, many of my posts are about the seasons and the cyclical nature of life. Or, maybe I only have 350 thoughts, give or take one or two, and it’s inevitable that I recycle them.

I say this as a preface to writing about violets, because I wrote about them last year. But this year I want to single out their punctuality, how I can always count on seeing them as soon as April arrives. I saw the first violets of the season on Saturday, when I lifted up the screen that had been protecting young lettuce and saw instead the first violet. Such a sweet, unassuming flower — but nevertheless a product of complex forces and drives. How else to explain the punctuality?

The timing of blossoms is big business around here; predicting the cherry trees’ peak bloom is both an art and a science. But what strikes me when I look at the violet is that its timing and placement is always perfect. Less heralded, but always on time.

From Sticks to Flowers

From Sticks to Flowers


Lately all we’ve been harvesting are twigs and branches from our brittle aging trees. The winds have blown and the sticks have fallen. But yesterday I noticed in the half-light of morning a tiny yellow flower, an anemone ( I think). I don’t recall planting it but I do remember seeing flowers like it in Sweden. Could a seed have slipped in on our shoes somehow? Are we planting in our sleep? I decide to take it for what it is: a mystery of spring.

When the Going Gets Tough

When the Going Gets Tough


Ice coats the streets, sidewalks and cars. Schools are closed. It’s time for fantasy travel. Today we visit Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. It’s a misty July afternoon and the roses are still blooming. Daylilies and larkspur are thriving. The air is so perfumed and moist that walking through it feels like an instant facial.

After a stroll under the rose arbor into the Japanese garden, you find a little tea shop, sip a cup of Earl Gray and sample a scone or two. Then you wander some more. You snap photos, lots of photos. You gather all sorts of ideas for your garden back home — then you realize that none of them will work because you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest. But you feel good just for imagining what might have been.

Second Chance Scent

Second Chance Scent


I missed honeysuckle season this spring, was traveling or getting ready to travel, so I’ve relished the second bloom of this aromatic weed. It is a weed, I think, or at least it acts like one: tumbling over fences and hedges, showing up uninvited in garden plots. I love it, though. Love the way its aroma takes me back to childhood, to the days when we played outside all day long. So yesterday I picked a sprig, brought it home and put it in a tiny vase. I’m sniffing it even as I write these words. The scent of spring, transported to fall.

A Remedy

A Remedy


A return to routine requires an antidote; in this case, flowers. Impatiens for the shady stoop and in between the ferns. Begonias for the deck. Zinnias for the garden. Weeds have gotten the upper hand. I pull them out by the fist-full. I find one red rose almost covered in the side yard. I plunge my hands into the earth and think about the summer, how it’s just starting. Last night I planted until I couldn’t see my hands in front of me anymore. Lightning bugs flickered around me.

Missing the Rose

Missing the Rose


“Mourning the Rose” was my first title for this post. But I thought better of it. After all, it’s a plant I’m missing, not a person or a pet. But the back yard seems empty without the climbing rose. For 20 years it’s shaded and delighted us. I’d always show off the tiny trellis dwarfed by the thick woody stems. I thought it showed what an able gardener I was. What it really revealed was how little I knew about climbing roses.

Its name was “New Dawn,” and when I bought it I still thought I could turn our yard into an English cottage garden. The astilbe, peony and other plants I bought at the same time never did very well. But the rose took to our hard clay soil and flourished for almost two decades.

I’m not enough of a gardener to understand what went wrong. Did I prune it too much or too little? Did it get a disease? Was it parched to oblivion in the drought two years ago? I’ll never know. But it’s hard not to see this as a metaphor. Did the rose flourish when our children were young and scampering about? Is its passing proof that life is passing me by? Nonsense, my practical self tells me. Something got it, and it’s gone. Plant another one, move on.

But about this time of year the long thorny boughs would be greening up and curling around the posts of the pergola, the buds would be full to bursting, the little bump-out roof of our kitchen would be groaning with the weight of all this bliss and all this blossom and I’d be looking forward to the rose’s biggest, grandest bloom at the end of May. Instead, I’m snapping off woody canes and throwing them on the brush pile in the back of the yard. I’m missing the rose.

The Violet

The Violet


“A violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye,
Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky.”
William Wordsworth

This violet is not by a mossy stone; it’s in our weedy backyard. But a violet is never degraded by the environment in which it finds itself. It always has about it an air of quiet beauty. Maybe it’s the color combination of flower and leaf, the vividness of the purple, the way it’s grounded by the green. Or maybe it’s the way it clusters with its own, as if waiting to be gathered into a bouquet. In the general boisterousness that is spring, the violet is shy and unassuming; it hugs the ground and skirts the edge of woodland trails.
Violets are part of my emotional-horticultural heritage. My mother has always loved them and her mother, my grandmother and namesake, always loved them, too. I have very few of my grandmother’s possessions, but I do have her violet-patterned china cup and saucer set, and I treasure it.
In the universal language that is flowers, the rose stands for love, the daisy stands for innocence, and the violet — for me the violet stands for tenderness and pride. It is the beauty of new life before the world gets to it.