The forget-me-nots have gone to seed and the late asparagus spears have grown tall and branched into ferns, but the Michigan spring continues to overwhelm me with beauty and drama. This peony, though it’s originally an heirloom bred 150 years ago in France, is nevertheless called Festiva Maxima, which is Latin for Big Party. It produces lots of flowers in conditions where other peonies pout. Definitely a party girl, not a wallflower.
In the even showier department, this one’s called Bowl of Beauty. The outer petals are more curved than they look in my photo, so yes, quite bowl-like.
For drama, how about this sky? I was assured there was no threat of tornado, but it sure looked like it had something up its sleeve. Not even rain, as it turned out. Just drama.
No rain so no rainbow so no pot of gold, but a plot of good fortune. They don’t always leap out at me, but I have two clumps of clover in my garden that regularly produced four-leaf clovers last year. They’ve come through again. One four-leafer lurks deep in the center of this photo.
Then there’s mystery – this little path that looks like it goes somewhere magical, or at least interesting. Nope. It goes to my hose bib. Appearances can be deceiving; in fact, in a garden, we often aim for that. In Japanese gardening tradition this is called Borrowed Landscape. My lawn fades into my neighbor’s lawn before you get to that fence.
And so we have it all here – beauty, drama, fortune, intrigue. I’ve been out in it all day, weeding, planting, staking, and of course spraying deer deterrent. When I find a four-leaf clover I bring it in, put it in a vase until it withers, then make a wish and add it to my “luck basket.” Still the same wish, and I can’t say what it is but we’ll all be very happy if it comes true.
One of the joys of the spring garden is surprise. Where did these ultra-fluffy, double pink columbine come from? Not only don’t I remember buying them, I don’t remember even knowing they existed. Could they have arrived as seeds embedded in bird droppings? Such an ignoble origin. Could there be a Johnny Columbineseed at large in Ann Arbor, spiriting unusual flowers into unsuspecting gardens under cover of night?
Then over here, how did one tiny patch of forget-me-nots take over the entire flowerbed, even crowding out weeds? A blue haze under the fading spikes of daffodil leaves, it manages to be really in your face despite such tiny petals. It should be called I-dare-you-to-forget-mes.
Moving around to the back yard, a flower pot that once held cosmos has come up with a crop of these little purple flowers, small enough to be violets but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Pansies were in the pot next to it last year. My garden books say four petals up and one down makes it a pansy, two petals up and three down is a violet. Two up, one down, and two sticking out to the side? Panselets?
And then there’s the asparagus patch. I’ve seen it every year since we moved into this house, but it still makes me laugh to see the way it comes up out of the ground, looking for all the world like someone has snuck out to the garden and stood a bunch of asparagus spears upright in the dirt as a practical joke. But no, they’re growing right out of the ground. The second joy of the spring garden: that dirt, water, and sunlight turn into food and beauty, whether the way we expected or not.
I have done nothing to deserve this tree.
It was exciting to find that the path of April’s solar eclipse ran through the Midwest. This was cool, except that the Midwest is charmingly green and fresh in April because it typically rains a lot in April. Cloudy weather, at the least, was to be expected. We only had to go as far as Toledo, a 45 minute drive, to see totality, so we wouldn’t need to set out before we had a weather report. The University of Toledo had a football stadium called The Glass Bowl – Toledo is the Glass Capital of the World – with free entry and a large, free parking lot. And bathrooms. Doug and I set out with our friends Bob and Sue, a picnic lunch, and folding chairs, and sailed right into traffic. But we anticipated that, so even with the ridiculous two and a half hours it took to get there, we were in plenty of time.
The clouds were thin. We ate our sandwiches and nibbled grapes, mandarins, and trail mix, looking up now and then through our eclipse glasses. Inside the stadium they had rock music and an announcer, which we could hear, but weren’t really listening. Until we heard him announce that it was six minutes to totality, and be sure to wear our glasses as long as we could see even a sliver of the disc of the sun. Now we turned completely toward the sun, glasses in place.
And then it was quiet. It got cold. It was dark. Birds chirped and nested in the nearby trees. The last sliver of sun succumbed to the moon’s shadow and we took off our glasses. There was the diamond ring, a brilliant, one-sided flash the clouds did not conceal, and then even the diamond ring disappeared and suddenly – so suddenly – the sun was a hole in the sky, pitch black, and a big corona danced around its perimeter. It was startling, how suddenly the corona leaped out at us. Where had it been all this time? How weird that it was always there and we could never tell – never, because even the smallest sliver of sun was too much for it, overpowered it. But now there it was – not showing up for our cameras, but perfectly plain to our bare eyes – a crown of flames; a circle of crazy lightning bolts, a nuclear lei, glorious. The moment it appeared, a cheer went up from the stadium. This was just what happened at totality in the eclipse of 2017: a spontaneous cheer! Hurray for the cosmos, which does not disappoint. Hurray for knowledge leading to reliable predictions, hurray for something to trust, hurray for the universe delivering beauty no matter how much we down here mess up. Hurray for good news. Hurray for something we can agree on: that it takes our breath away. Hurray for the shared experience and not carping that our awareness of it was provided by – oh yes – elites. Hurray for forgetting ourselves for these two minutes, and talking part in something bigger.
We packed up the car and joined the crowd streaming home, strangely tired considering all we did was sit while the moon did all the work. Elation, exuberance, and amazement can really tire you out. Once again, Doug was right: there is nothing like an eclipse.
It seems odd coming right after Easter like this, but happy April Fools Day! Salt in the sugar bowl, bubble wrap under the rug – are they classics, or cliches? Here’s a poem for which I gathered and strung together all the chicken cliches I could think of. Credit to Blain’s Farm and Fleet of Jackson, Michigan, for the chicken flock photo.
The dearth of snow continues. Can we still call these little early flowers “snowdrops” when there’s no snow? “Raindrops” is already taken. Lawndrops? Not only are they coming up in lawn instead of snow, but the lawn is already turning green.
It’s hard to know how much temperature shift to take into account for next year’s plantings since change, including climate change, proceeds in a zigzag fashion. Even if the long-term trend is higher up the zone chart, it could still be cold again next winter. On the other hand, it could just keep right on warming up. I worried about my scilla, also known as Siberian Squill, but it turns out not to be native to Siberia at all, and is said to be able to flourish up to Zone 8. So I have two zones to spare.
Hellebores turn out to be native to the Mediterranean, which makes me wonder what on earth they’re doing blooming in Michigan in February and March – in snow, when we had any. Apparently they’ll be fine if Ann Arbor warms up.
I was able to grow paperwhite narcissus outdoors when I lived in Southern California, but had mixed results with other daffodils and tulips. In my front yard here I have an extremely satisfying collection of daffodils that bloom from March through April and into early May. The first of these are out and dancing right now, in the rain, little happy suns.
Deer do not eat any of these – the tulips they would love to feast on are coming up inside the fenced part of the garden. Rabbits will nibble on the emerging buds of grape hyacinth, but the hawks and owls are keeping the rabbits in check at the moment. That balance of power shifts sometimes for reasons I haven’t figured out. The bunnies are not abroad yet, but as Easter approaches my little window of Bunny Appreciation opens. Critters responsible for lovely baskets, brightly painted eggs, chocolate candy, and new beginnings, surely deserve to be cut a little slack while I check the garden fence for break-ins.
Still February, the trees still hung with snow, but the bulbs on my windowsill are talking spring. They’re cozy enough on the plant stand Doug made for them, at a sunny, south-facing window with a heat register on the floor below. You can see Zerlina down there on her cushion, showing her appreciation with a nap.
I mostly keep the amaryllis going from year to year, setting them outdoors when the weather warms up, lifting and storing the bulbs indoors in the fall, and potting them up again after Christmas. But every year I lose one or two, so every year I buy one or two new ones.
This is a close-up of my new bulb this year, an Amadeus. Is it named for Mozart, or is it Beloved of God? Amaryllis is named for a shepherdess Virgil wrote about, in Latin, but the name apparently comes from Greek amarysso, to sparkle. And it’s native to South Africa. I would love to know its indigenous name, but the internet has not been forthcoming. There’s an International Association for Plant Taxonomy that oversees official plant names, but any seed catalog will reveal that common names are a mix of history and marketing. The names of tomato varieties are always fun, and frequently informative. Early Girl and Longkeeper are useful to know, while Mortgage Lifter and Supersteak evoke the plump and sizeable. Tomato is pretty close to its indigenous Nahuatl name, Tomatl. Far preferable to solanum lycopersicum.
Meanwhile, the narcissus is starting to nose up through the snow. Narcissus should have a name joyfully recognizing how the flower announces spring, instead of being named for the fellow who fell in love with his own reflection. Is some kind of warning implied here, like not getting carried away by spring? Maybe Greeks, with their Mediterranean climate, didn’t understand the impact of spring on the rest of us. Our common name, daffodil, is a corruption of Asphodel, also Greek but a totally unrelated flower. It was good to corrupt it, since asphodel is associated with the underworld, but daffodil sounds like happy fun.
Hellebore is also a Greek name, possibly having to do with it being toxic, but it’s starting to bloom here in my yard, pushing the snow out of its way, right on time for its common name, Lenten Rose. It’s not a rose at all, but when you finally see a flower, even one that isn’t sweet, where no flower has dared go for months, let us call it a rose.
February second is Groundhog Day, when the groundhog and her shadow predict either six more weeks of winter or an early spring. Six weeks from February second only gets you to mid-March. How were they defining early spring? Mid-March is not spring in Michigan, and in California, where I used to live, February is not winter.
So where did the story come from? Ages ago in Ireland, February first was Imbolc, holiday of Brigid, the Gaelic goddess of spring and fertility. It was about as early in the year as you could tell the days were getting longer. Candles were lit in celebration of that and the possibility, in Ireland, of winter ending in fewer than six weeks. When Christianity came to Ireland Brigid became a saint, and her holiday Candlemass. Gaelic holidays ran from sunset of one day to sunset of the next, which I’m guessing is how it moved to February second.
Animal behavior was often used in the past to predict weather, from hedgehogs to badgers to bears to groundhogs. There’s even a cat in Ohio who makes spring weather predictions by how he eats pierogi. The hope was that animals in their ancestral innocence and closeness to nature could tell, in ways we no longer could, whether conditions were ripe for moving out into the world. Punxsatawny Phil has been the one to watch since the 1880’s. He’s never been very accurate, but he completes the evolutionary cycle of many Western holidays (Halloween, for instance): from pagan religion, through Christianity, to secular. So we have Groundhog Day. Sadly, according to Wikipedia, “the observed behavior of groundhogs… was that they mostly come out of their burrows in mid-March, regardless of Groundhog Day weather.”
Daylight grows but winter persists in February – it’s not a coincidence that Groundhog Day was a movie about being stuck in an endless time loop. But it was also a movie about taking advantage of endless time loops, making good use of the present. As A.E. Housman wrote:
“And since to look at things in bloom
After weeks of bare lawns and empty flower beds, dusted occasionally by snow traces that washed out immediately in rain, here it is, finally: snow, decorating the trees, blanketing the yard, and multiplying the light of the sky. My reward for winter. It was in the weather forecast several times without materializing, a gift withheld. I woke to it yesterday morning like a promise kept. Winter without snow in Michigan was just wrong, so when it came, even those who most complained about it had a certain level of relief. Things were going as they were supposed to go.
The snow exaggerates the shapes of some things, gives definition to others.
It shook the last of the crabapples out of the trees and laid them out on the snow for the deer.
Robin Richstone 