The climbing roses are hitting their peak, creamy pink flowers on a carpet of green. While you can enjoy them from the deck or yard, they are best seen from a second floor bedroom window, where I snapped this shot.
I think there may be a life lesson in this: getting up and above things to see them whole.
With the climbing roses, as with life, perspective is all.
May is unfolding slowly here, with cool nights and days that stay firmly in the 70s. I think that’s about to change soon, so I’m enjoying this cool morning and the bird song I hear as I write this post.
The trees have fully leafed out and the annuals I’ve planted are taking root. In the front yard, the breakout roses have snuck up on me again. (They’re not as full and healthy as the roses here … I wish … but given the shade in which they struggle, at least they’re still alive.) In fact, all is green and growing here, especially the weeds!
Inside, clocks are ticking, Copper is napping (after our walk at 7) and I’m grabbing a few quiet moments of what promises to be a busy one.
Thinking of all the possibilities …
It’s a good way to begin the day.
It’s been here for decades, this peony. It doesn’t always thrive; some years it doesn’t even bloom. But it remains. A stalwart.
Does it like where it’s been planted? It looks more comfortable than usual this year. The greenery is full and the ants were in place (which is required, I believe), so I tucked the mulch carefully around the stems, and snapped this shot.
The peony was one of the originals I ordered in my early attempt at an English cottage garden, an idea that didn’t flourish in this hard-packed Virginia clay soil. But it reminds me of my youthful enthusiasm and my gardening naïveté. It harkens back to a time before deer ate most of the plants and stilt grass had yet to invade our turf.
But enough of this gardening gloom. It’s May, and the peony (singular) is in bloom. All’s right with the world!
In a slight twist on “March winds and April showers,” we’re in the midst of an April wind that follows on the heels of an April shower.
That has meant that the April flowers, in this case the lovely pink rose-like blooms of the Kwanzan cherry, are no longer attached to the tree but strewn about the grass.
This is the way of the world, is it not? And has anyone expressed this more simply and more beautifully than Robert Frost?
“So leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
Saturday I impulsively bought two hyacinths at the grocery store. They were tidy little plants then, barely open at all. But even on the short drive home they filled the car with their scent. Now they’re doing the same in the house.
I thought they would make a pretty Easter centerpiece, but they’re opening so fast that I may have to buy another arrangement before Sunday.
The point is, they are blooming now, I tell myself. So enjoy them. Savor the blooming and the bending. Prop up the heaviest flowers with skewer sticks so they stay upright. And then … inhale deeply.
According to my favorite weather site, the cherry blossoms may last as long as 10 days this year. Though I haven’t checked on the Tidal Basin flowers since Monday evening, I can tell by the hordes on Metro that hanami is still in full force.
As the blooming season moves out to my neighborhood (always a few days later than the city trees), my ho-hum daily drives are taking on a hanami quality of their own. I’m slowing down, seeking out the streets I know from years past.
There are the Bradford pears in Franklin Farm, the redbuds on Folkstone, the Kwanzan cherry in my own front yard. All of this, if the weather cooperates, in a slow steady procession through dogwoods and azaleas — a riot of bloom that takes us from the gray trunks of winter all the way to the vivid fuchsias and scarlets of mid-May.
I just happened upon the ranger talk at the Tidal Basin last evening at 6 p.m. I’d decided to see the cherry blossoms after work, and then, impulsively, walked counterclockwise instead of the other way around. And there, at the FDR Memorial, was a green-suited ranger with a Smokey the Bear hat.
He was speaking of L’Enfant when I arrived, but went on from there to cover the flood of 1881, the creation of the Tidal Basin and the ugly construction-site look of the land around it at the turn of the 19th century. He described National Geographic writer Eliza Scidmore’s 24-year campaign to plant Japanese cherry trees around the basin, a quest that finally took root, so to speak, when President Taft’s wife, Helen, became interested in the project. (The lantern above commemorates the spot where Taft planted one of the first cherry trees.)
There are other twists and turns to this story and how cherry trees came to dominate the landscape around the Washington and Lincoln monuments. But my favorite part of the talk came when the ranger talked about the Japanese custom of hanami or “flower viewing” of the sakura or cherry blossoms.
The sakura represents a “short life, well-lived,” the ranger said, and for that reason was revered by both samurai warriors and kamikaze pilots. Hanami celebrates the fleetingness of the blossoms, the beauty that is ours just for a moment — and more lovely because of it.
It’s March 9 and the daffodils have pushed themselves at least two inches through ground. But the ground is now covered … not in mulch but in snow.
Welcome to what the Capital Weather Gang calls “conversational snow.” This is white stuff that we talk about but do not fear. Snow that clings to trees and grass but not roads.
This snow fell yesterday but lingers today. Conversational? Yes. But not hardly whispered. Just ask the witch hazel tree (foreground), with its yellow blossoms all coated and frozen. It would like to change the conversation, I think. And it will have its chance. Tomorrow, we could hit 70!
We’re at that point in the season when the bright hue of autumn leaves has not yet arrived and the muted palette of late summer prevails. Sedum and asters, the faded rose of late-blooming crepe myrtle.
All that’s left of clematis paniculata are the spent blossoms of the tiny white flowers.
And then there are the shaggy meadow flowers, the golden rod and Joe Pye Weed.
It’s easy to wander long amidst the subtle shades of this subtle season.
In the last few days, summer has caught up with itself. Mornings have been cooler with that steady thrum of insect noise that you don’t notice until it goes away in the fall.
To be able to work outside with the heat building, cicadas crescendoing and every so often a stray idea making its way into my brain … well, it’s very good indeed.
When I need to take a break, I dead-head the roses, lean down and sniff the ones that are still blooming. Then I let my gaze shift to blank and stare out at the green and oh-so-weedy backyard.
Nothing is perfect, it seems to say, but look what less-than-pefect gets you.
