Make it up to me
Posted on June 4, 2008
Filed Under milestones, cheer, spring, horticulture, plants |
Mother Nature can be such a stingy bitch - all Winter, well into Spring. There’s that one moment, in late April when it’s raw and dripping and windy and gray and you decide it’s just too late for her to make it up to you, that you’ve just plain given up hoping for something better and BAM, she’ll begin to woo you. She’ll put on her party dress and roll out the hors d’oeuvres. She’ll ply you with the horticultural equivalent of fine champagne. And she has impeccable timing, this Mother Nature. It’s as if she’s finally thrown up her hands and embraced her dysphoria. Someone, Father Nature perhaps, has finally convinced her to up her meds and suddenly she’s all petals and pollen and heady scent, balmy evenings and chartreuse lawns.
While this shift from mean spirited withholding to lightness and love is, at first, subtle, by mid-May it’s firecrackers and a full symphony. First there is the Forsythia and daffodils, all that yellow hopefulness just sticking up, bare naked from the dark, raw earth, the portent of something more spectacular to come. Then there are the tulips and hyacinths, cheerful beginnings, the miniature companions to the viburnum and the lilacs.
While the lilacs flush late May, their perfume fills the backyard spaces with the scent of Paris. Mother Nature is wordly that way, dropping a little bit of France right down in suburban Massachusetts. And just as the lavender and white of the lilacs begin to brown, she turns it up a notch, like an apology for lilac endings. There is the sudden promise of peonies, their globular blooms standing high and hopeful against the barely open drifts of purple cat mint. The Lily of the Valley put on their tiny white, intensely fragrant bells while the irises open to reveal the complicated folds of yellow, garnet and purple flowers. Paper thin, flouncy and loud, the iris is the garden’s equivalent to Great Aunt Emma in her garish hat and ruffled party dress.
The Therese Bugnet rose bush is, all at once, covered in buds. She offers up a handful of open flowers each morning, the deep, sweet fragrance of a rugosa rose on the air at dawn. The foxglove behind her has decided to play along, a spire of dappled blooms drooping from its one stalk, a botanical oddity, a high school student without a prom date, alone and awkwardly fancy in her polka dots.
And there are yellow, familiar day lilies sprinkled about and bouncing on the breeze. Their cheerful faces like ordinary folk, casual and comfortable and somehow reassuring in their dungarees and lightly stained t-shirts. They are all of us, the lady at the check out, the reliable mail man, taken for granted because they are decent and accessible.
And of course there is the 30 foot shrub outside the dining room window that Mother Nature has decorated with a million light violet bursts of early June. Her rhododendron, the true harbinger of summer, has been dolled up, trotted out, her majesty’s most magnificent display of affection, the three tiered cake at the end of the gala. You are drunk and sated, made slightly vulnerable by all these offerings and so you say, “I accept. I forgive. Now bring on the delicate white shower of the Bridal Wreath and all that February hopelessness will be forgotten.” 
Fairy art courtesy of Fairy Art Postcards
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