#mayflowers: a new series.

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.

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#31things: signs of spring.

To quote Ben Weatherstaff: “crocuses an’ snowdrops an’ daffydowndillys.” I search for them amid the dirty snow. They are delight, relief, joy—a splash of hope when everything is still grey. 

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And the roses

The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended them.

Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score, gaily defying flowers which had lived in the garden for years and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there.

And the roses—the roses!

Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour.

Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.

I keep thinking of these lines from The Secret Garden as I walk around Cambridge, stopping to sniff roses and snap pictures and marvel at the colors. Summer has arrived and I am reveling in it, naming its glories: poppies, iris, peonies, columbines, honeysuckle, trees in full vivid green leaf.

I don’t know the names of everything I see, but as Mary Oliver says, “one doesn’t need to know the names to feel the presences.” I do know the roses, though, and their sweet scent and rich, velvety colors are a delight both familiar and new.

I carried pink roses at my wedding, nine summers ago, and I picked wild roses on my grandparents’ farm as a child. My florist’s shop has buckets of them right now, in every color of the rainbow. But I love seeing them along the sidewalks too, nodding their heads in the breeze. They are “sweetness pure and simple” (Mary Oliver again), and they are saving my life these days.

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Watching for spring

‘Springtime’s coming,’ he said. ‘Cannot tha’ smell it?’

Mary sniffed and thought she could.

‘I smell something nice and fresh and damp,’ she said.

‘That’s th’ good rich earth,’ he answered, digging away. ‘It’s in a good humour makin’ ready to grow things. It’s glad when plantin’ time comes. In th’ flower gardens out there things will be stirrin’ down below in th’ dark. Th’ sun’s warmin’ ’em. You’ll see bits o’ green spikes sticking out o’ th’ black earth after a bit.’

‘What will they be?’ asked Mary.

‘Crocuses an’ snowdrops an’ daffydowndillys. Has tha’ never seen them?’

‘No. Everything is hot, and wet, and green after the rains in India,’ said Mary. ‘And I think things grow up in a night.’

‘These won’t grow up in a night,’ said Weatherstaff. ‘Tha’ll have to wait for ‘em. They’ll poke up a bit higher here, and push out a spike more there, an’ uncurl a leaf this day an’ another that. You watch ‘em.’

‘I am going to,’ answered Mary.

— The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

I spotted the first crocuses of the season (pictured above) on Monday, in the yard of a house with a purple door. They sent me running to my bookshelf for my green-covered paperback of this lovely book, which chronicles an astonishing series of transformations. The bitter, lonely orphan Mary Lennox, the spoiled invalid Colin Craven, and Colin’s reclusive, embittered father, Archibald Craven (Mary’s uncle), are renewed and restored, as surely as the fallow ground and tangled plants in the walled garden are made new after lying dormant for ten years.

I loved this story as a child, because I love gardens and England and stories of hope. But only since spending two winters in Oxford, and then three in Boston, have I come to appreciate the true wonder of spring. In a place where two feet of snow can fall in March, a clump of crocuses on a sunny day feels like a miracle – even if you’re wearing a down coat when you spot them.

Like Mary, I am watching the green spikes sticking out of the black earth, rejoicing in the plump robins hopping around campus, relishing the suddenly longer evenings. I am waiting for soft air and blossoming trees, and for the appearance of rhubarb at the grocery store. Spring, more than any other season, inspires me to pay attention, and until it arrives, you can find me watching and waiting, alert for the first signs of bud and bloom.

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