Hello, friends. It’s (suddenly) May, and the world is in bloom – the apple blossoms, lilacs and my beloved tulips are splashing out with color these days. I’m feeling the need for a new writing series, so this month I’ll be sharing with you reflections on – what else? – the flowers I love.
I’ve always been a flower fiend, though as a little girl, I didn’t see a lot of the flowers I regularly see here in New England. We had a daylily bed out back (until our rabbit, Barney, ate them all), and I regularly saw dandelions and other wildflowers, but the vegetation in West Texas is wildly (ha) different from where I live now.
My mother has red yucca and oleander in her yard, these days, and I remember puffball begonia plants and potted geraniums in front of our house in Dallas. But the flowers I read about in storybooks mostly remained just that. West Texas is too dry for lilacs and hydrangeas, crocuses and magnolias, and the only zinnias and gladioli I knew were the ones in my Neno’s garden in Ohio.
One of the beautiful, consistent gifts of living in Boston is watching the cycle of flowers as the seasons change. Again: we have seasons in West Texas, but they’re drastically different (and much dustier, mostly) than the ones here in New England. The earliest spring flowers, especially, are dear to me not only for themselves, but as signals that the winter is finally over. The green shoots signal warmer air, longer days, the emergence of people and activities from winter hibernation. And the first ones out – sometimes poking up through literal snow – are, fittingly, the snowdrops.
I first read about snowdrops in The Secret Garden, when Ben Weatherstaff teaches Mary about the plants she’ll see emerging in the Yorkshire spring. I didn’t know what they looked like, though I assumed they’d be white. I didn’t quite understand that some flowers could sprout, even bloom, when it was still cold out. (In my hometown, where the temperature swings can be wild, and spring arrives in mid-March, it doesn’t quite work like that.)
I don’t think I saw snowdrops with my own eyes until my first spring in Oxford, as a college student. There, as here, you can find them in flowerbeds and gardens, often the first reliable sign of green after the winter rains. I was amazed to see them blooming before spring had truly started, in University Parks and in front gardens behind low stone walls. They were a delightful surprise that first year, and every year I have lived in Boston, they have proved a reliable harbinger.
When I worked in Cambridge, I learned to watch for signs of spring: the crocuses in the yard of the house across the street from Darwin’s; the bulbs in front of the yellow house on Hilliard Street; the daffodils along the Charles River, and later the lilacs in front of Longfellow House. I learned, too, to watch for snowdrops there: even in the bitterest winters, they start popping up all over Cambridge in February and early March. They’re often struggling up through mulch and snow and leaf litter, but they are determined. Touched by weak early-spring sunshine, they break through and ring their tiny bells to herald winter’s end.
More flower reflections and photos to come.
cakes, tea and dreams 