Tag: hellebores

Winter, Light, and Windows

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The weather’s been having a lot of fun with us. Over the last week we’ve been up and down the thermometer from ten degrees to fifty and back, with the coming week predicted to do the same. In the warm spells the snow goes, and when the snow goes we lose a lot of information. In this photo from a few days ago, you see a clear demonstration of why I only grow my tomatoes behind a fence. A few other animals wander through, but that’s mostly the heart-shaped hoofprints of deer.

That evidence is gone now, but the strengthening light has its own games to play. To me this photo shows the lovely effect of the sun’s rays reaching out like fingers of a warm, gentle hand. My grandmother saw it as “the sun drawing water.” I thought that was awfully prosaic, but it’s another possible point of view: where I see something coming down, she saw something going up. It’s so common for different people to look at the same thing and see it differently, it must be an advantage to a community – whatever’s happening in the world, you have options in deciding what to do. 

Whether the sun is pulling them up or their roots are pushing them out, my hellebores are positioning themselves to be ready for the race to spring. They don’t exactly die back in winter but they lie low. Their newly perked-up posture chimes with their nickname, Lenten Roses, and bodes well for flowers well before Easter. 

The increasing light also plays games with my indoor plants. From the dining room window it looks like there’s something red blooming outside on the snow, or at least some persistent fallen leaves. But no. It’s the reflected glory of the poinsettias, the window partly a mirror and partly transparent in this particular afternoon sunshine. 

There’s a little of the same thing going on at my studio window, though you have to look beyond the riot of frills and frolic that is my amaryllis collection to see it. The red phantom of an amaryllis has materialized way out by the road, where a last strip of snow hangs on in the shadows. Is it a ghost of the past winter? A mirage of the coming spring? Now new snow is falling, thin and unconvincing, much of the ground too warm to sustain it. The red ghosts are gone but their fleshly originals are still at my windows, stretching out to lean against the glass, in case the sun calls on them again for a bit of magic.

Things That Stay, Things That Change

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Faithful to the season, the hellebores lifted themselves out of the dirt in time to wave hello to lent. I should have been paying closer attention, because I missed getting my paczki this year – a special Polish pastry available only at Mardi Gras. Not, of course, called Mardi Gras in Polish, but I have enough trouble spelling paczki (it’s pronounced “punchkey”) to venture another Polish word. Every year the hellebore tribe increases in my yard; they seem especially ruffly this year.

The tribe of the deer increased this year, too. Over the winter we had a group of eight, then a group of twelve, but now they’ve merged into a group of twenty, more than I’ve ever seen at once on my lawn. It’s odd, because normally the herds break into smaller units come spring. Maybe the deer equivalent of paczki is coming up in through the grass.

Another spring surprise for me was this orchid, a gift from a friend last year, reblooming. I’ve been given orchids before, enjoyed them while they bloomed, and then watched them wither and die. My previous experience with orchids was as corsages, or seeing them in California where they grew outdoors. So I assumed a windowsill was not great orchid habitat, yet here she is, all aglow. 

Behind her, in brighter light, is another outdoor California plant, a bougainvillea, which has come back from a near-death experience. It had dwindled to a total of four leaves before I realized the gnats in the room were a sign of fungus in its soil. I had a three-pronged attack for this, so I’m not sure which part worked. First I mixed hydrogen peroxide into a pitcher of water and soaked the soil with it, as a fungus killer. Then I poked holes in the soil nearest the sad bare branches and shook in some rooting powder, to try to regenerate healthy roots. Then I painted the four stalwart leaves with Miracle-gro, a foliar feeder, to help it out until its roots recovered. It worked! Yay!

Meanwhile, it’s been fun getting to know our new cat. Frassy has found all Zerlina’s old favorite spots, and invented a few of her own. Zerlina was afraid of sticks, or anything sticklike, from which we guessed she had once been abused with them. Frassy seems to be trauma-free. She’s especially fond of Doug. Here he is playing with her with a feather toy on a stick. She’s already bitten through the string once – see the knot where I tied it back together? She’s also ferocious with her two toy mice. If we do really have a mouse in the house, I hope we won’t for long.