The weather’s been up, down, and sideways this spring, uncertain enough to keep my seedlings stuck in the house, looking out their sunny window as erratic frost rolls and unrolls over the lawn. But out in the yard, the perennials are not confused. The reliable chives wave their purple goodbyes to the daffodils, while the last of the wild hyacinths refuses to cede ground. Nice try, but nothing can stop the chives.
Across the lawn from the herb garden, at the edge of the woods, I’ve made a tiny patio of a few rows of bricks. It’s just big enough for a single chair, me, and a cup of tea, maybe a book. The lilies of the valley would like me to know, though they look dainty and possess the scent of sweet innocence, that they are a power to be reckoned with, and should have been consulted. Their outrider will move that brick if I don’t stop him.
The asparagus, another perennial, has been poking its fingers up through leaf mold for weeks now, and the time has come for me to stop cutting and carting them off for dinner, and let them feed themselves instead. They’re at the stage now where they look like, well, sort of skanky Christmas trees – the tightly-closed tips expanded into branches, but the ferny leaves not yet fluffing them out.
Sturdy, reliable, undemanding, how nice that these trusty plants come back every year with no effort on my part. My lamium, for example – such an excellent groundcover. But what’s that little purple flower sneaking into the picture from the upper right hand corner? Creeping Charlie! A weed! Alas, a perennial too, and just as determined to come back as all the others. The traits so wonderful in a plant you want, so aggravating in a plant you don’t. It’s hard to see their habits as the same, but they are.
Take garlic mustard, for instance. Early colonists brought it with them as a desirable salad green, but few here today consider it palatable. Including me – I’ve tried it. It’s not perennial, but so profligate of seed it might as well be. When I first moved to Michigan and saw stands of garlic mustard blooming in spring, I thought it was lovely. Then I discovered its aspirations to world dominance. Its specialty is swamping the opposition in a bid to turn diversity into monoculture, as though some mega-chemical company were in charge. If only my basil would do that.
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.
Robin Richstone 