Same time, next year

One of the interesting things about keeping a blog is how easily you can compare what’s happening (or blooming) now with what was happening (or blooming) the previous year. This time last year, I was moving out of my apartment in Keene, which seems like a lifetime or two ago. When I remember how tiring it was to sort through, pack, and move the contents of an apartment I’d rented for eight years, I’m that much more grateful for being quietly settled this year.

Last night I remarked to friends that the mountain laurels seem to be blooming earlier this year than last, but then I second-guessed myself. Doesn’t summer sneak up on me every year, time flying faster and faster with every season? A quick blog-check reveals I’d included a picture of mountain laurels in an early June post in which I discussed Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love, which I was reading this time last year. In 2010, the mountain laurels were blooming on May 26th, just like this year, so I was half right: the mountain laurels didn’t bloom this early last year, but this year’s blooming isn’t entirely out-of-the-ordinary.

“Same Time, Next Year” was a film starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn about a man and woman who meet for an adulterous weekend every year for several decades. I saw the movie with my mother when it came out in 1978, when I was nine years old. I was probably too young for a “PG” movie: I don’t remember most of the details of the story, since the jokes and “adult themes” flew right over my prepubescent head. But what I do remember was how the two characters remained faithful to one another and their once-a-year commitment even though they both changed over time, their annual trysts becoming a kind of benchmark for the rest of their lives.

I “meet” with my blog two or three times a week, but that’s enough to keep the relationship between us alive. At any given moment when I want to compare my life today with some previous version, I don’t have to call upon an adulterous lover: my blog will do. This time last year, I was reading Diane Ackerman; right now, I’m reading Terry Tempest Williams and Alison Bechdel. Who knows what I’ll be reading–or what I’ll be doing, or what will be blooming–this time next year, but chances are I’ll still keep a faithful record.

 

Early bloomers

Last week was unseasonably warm, so over the weekend all of Newton seemed to be blooming, buzzing, and leafing: a flurry of flowering.

Spring’s first burst of activity is typically tenuous, however, and tonight temperatures are predicted to plunge below freezing. I don’t worry much for the wild plants and trees that were lured into leafing last week, as they are long accustomed to New England’s meteorological mood swings. But farmers who tend fruit orchards are rightfully worried that their early bloomers won’t last: the perennial risk of relying upon nature’s seasonal bounty in the age of Global Weirding.

 

Through the cracks

Because we’ve had so little snow this past winter, the exposed soil in our backyard flower beds has deep, fissure-like cracks, and right now those cracks are sprouting the first tentative flowers of spring. I’m not much of a gardener, and neither is J: although J takes pride in tending our lawn and shrubs, neither one of us has ever planted any flowers here.

Instead, every spring and summer we’re surprised by the magical re-appearance of perennials our house’s prior owners planted: crocuses, snowdrops, tulips, daffodils, scilla, and a whole parade of ornamental flowers whose names I don’t know. During the spring and summer, our backyard feels like a botanical time capsule, with someone else’s green thumb giving us unsolicited gifts. I sometimes wonder about the hands that planted the bulbs that continue to sprout every year with no human assistance. Did the planter of these bulbs know how long they’d bloom after their departure, and could they have envisioned how much joy they’d bring to a future homeowner they never even met?

 

Floral

Photographing flowers in a greenhouse is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel: your subject is captive and motionless, so it doesn’t take much skill to capture it. But in the gray, barren days at the end of a gray, barren winter, you don’t necessarily care about proving your photographic prowess. It’s just a relief to be in the presence of something floral.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Floral.

 

In due time

In past years, I’ve regaled you with photos of snowdrops sprouting near a stone wall Reggie and I passed nearly every morning on our walks, a place where crocuses sprouted in the shade of trees that have since been felled. Now that Reggie is old, we don’t go that far on our morning walks: just around the block if the weather’s nice, and not even that when it’s wet or the footing is treacherous. When you live with an old dog, you suit your stride (and the length of your walks) to his abilities.

This year, thanks to a milder-than-usual winter, the snowdrops have come to us. I knew there was a cluster of perennial bulbs in our front yard, planted by other hands beneath the shelter of our front eaves…but most years, those snowdrops lie buried beneath a winter’s worth of snow raked from our roof. How frustrating it must be to be a cluster of snowdrops planted in a place that is perpetually piled with snow. How many years, one after the other, have these resilient plants sent up hopeful sprouts, only to hit a cold ceiling of snow?

When J and I visited the Wellesley Greenhouses this past weekend, we encountered a similar example of vegetative resilience: an otherwise ordinary-looking shingle plant that is blooming for only the second time in eleven years.

It’s a sight J and I would have normally missed, but an enthusiastic greenhouse worker pulled us aside, having noticed our cameras: “You’ll want to get a photo of this!” When, normally, would an otherwise ordinary-looking plant sprouting otherwise nondescript greenish-white flowers draw attention of a couple of amateur paparazzi? The only thing remarkable about these flowers is the simple fact that they are there. On a plant where nothing has bloomed for nine out of eleven years, this year there is something: a tiny handful of hope.

It cheers me to consider the vegetative persistence of both these plants–not exactly late bloomers, but blooms that appeared in due time. For so many years, the time wasn’t right for our front-yard snowdrops or the Wellesley College shingle plant: for so many years, these two have been quietly going about their vegetative business in the shadow of other, showier specimens. But this spring, for whatever reason, time itself has blossomed into fullness: a moment when the stars and season perfectly aligned, sending a clear signal to Bloom Now, without delay.

 

So easy being green

This weekend, J and I visited the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College, which I’d blogged years ago. Although this winter has been mild and almost entirely snow-free, I’m tired of looking at the bare, brown ground. February and March are months when I’m typically starved for color, so I thought visiting a well-tended greenhouse would serve as a virtual trip to the tropics.

When I first suggested J and I visit the Wellesley greenhouses, I pictured myself taking endless macro shots of flowers as I do every year when the first blossoms appear. Instead, however, what drew my eye time and again this weekend was the sight of greenery.

I’m tired, as I said, of looking at the bare, brown ground, and I long for a season when the grass is lush and green rather than dry and yellow. As J and I wandered from one warm and humid room to another, it was the sight of green leaves that repeatedly attracted my eye. Colorful flowers are wonderful, but it’s chlorophyll I crave.

When you wander a greenhouse with your heart tuned toward green, you’ll discover how richly diverse the wide verdant world is. Green comes in many shades and shapes, and each appeals in its own fashion.

In due time, the bare New England earth will itself erupt in fresh foliage. But for the time being, I’ve stockpiled a cache of images I’ll hold in my heart: both a reminder and a promise of greener days.

 

Seedy

 

Freeze dried

 

A thousand flowers

Long-time readers of “Hoarded Ordinaries” might remember the entry I posted after seeing the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in March, 2006. Crafted by 19th century glass artisans Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, these botanical specimens amazed me with their life-like detail. “Hearing the phrase ‘glass flowers,’” I wrote, “I imagined the objects on exhibit would look like glass first and flowers second: pretty, colorful, and entirely artificial looking, more art than science.” What I’d expected when I went to see the Blaschkas’ glass flowers, in other words, was something like the work of Dale Chihuly.

The countless flower-like forms in “Through the Looking Glass,” the exhibit of Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts through August 8th, are exactly what the Blaschkas’ flowers aren’t. Commissioned by a botany professor in 1886, the Blaschkas’ glass flowers are realistic specimens that capture plant anatomy in painstaking detail. Dale Chihuly’s flowering forms, on the other hand, suggest the color and shape of flowers as seen in a dream. The Blaschkas captured the anatomical details of plants as they are, and Dale Chihuly captures the contours and colors of flowers as they could be. “These are flowers,” you might say in response to the Blaschkas’ handiwork; of Chihuly’s specimens, “these are flowers on drugs.” Any questions?

“It’s like standing inside a kaleidoscope,” one museum-goer observed. “It’s like something out of Willy Wonka,” another woman noted. Stepping into Dale Chihuly’s fertile, flowering world, you’re forced to resort to metaphor, the forms before you not quite matching anything you’ve seen before. “It kind of looks like a cactus,” one visitor said in reference to Chihuly’s “Lime Green Icicle Tower,” and I overheard other onlookers comparing various pieces to fruit, candy, and an entire menagerie of exotic, sinuous creatures.

Turning the corner to consider the room-length wilderness of “Mille Fiori,” for instance, you might as well leave language at the door, the forms before you suggesting a hybrid riot of animal, vegetable, and miracle.

“Oh, my!” was how one child described it, and she stole the words right out of my mouth. Is this a marsh filled with reedy tangles or an exploded candy-factory offering a wealth of candy canes and rainbow-hued jawbreakers?

Time and again, I heard parents quizzing their wide-eyed youngsters: “Which one is your favorite?” And time and again, I heard children resorting to fanciful descriptions: “The pink snaky one!” “The one that looks like licorice!” “The peppermint!” Adults, too, pointed, gesticulated, and struggled to categorize what they saw. A debate arose, for instance, around a huddle of pointy-ended black blobs: were they tubers, snails, seals, or shrews? Unlike the Blaschkas’ glass flowers, which are politely labeled with genus and species, the creations in Chiluly-Land defy categorization, blurring the boundary between plant and animal, actual and imaginary. This ain’t your Grandma’s flower garden, but a psychedelic romp through a land of light and color.

As if the thousand flowers of “Mille Fiori” weren’t mind-boggling enough, the glowing expanse of Chihuly’s “Persian Ceiling” evokes an other-worldly, aquatic realm. Are these underwater flowers, terrestrial jellyfish, or translucent denizens of a yet-to-be-discovered planet?

The Blaschkas themselves made glass invertebrates–”jellyfish, anemones, planarians (flat worms), polychaetes (tube-dwelling worms), sponges, radiolarians and assorted molluscs”–that reside in Dublin’s Natural History Museum, which I visited in February, 2006…but again, the Blaschkas’ crystal jellies are worlds apart from Chihuly’s aquatic creatures. The Blaschkas captured the weird colors and stunning shapes of creatures that actually exist: their work mesmerizes because it suggests things you might see if you traveled the world with open eyes. Chihuly’s work, on the other hand, offers a fantastic glimpse into a world that never was: the muscae volitantes of imagination’s eye.

Click here for more photos of Dale Chihuly’s “Mille Fiori,” or click here for more images of his “Persian Ceiling.” Click here to see a complete photo-set from Chihuly’s exhibit at the MFA. Enjoy!

 

Risen indeed

It’s easy to believe in resurrection on a warm and sunny day when even the trees are bursting into flower.

Saturday was gray and drizzly, with temperatures in the 40s; today was a mix of sun and clouds, with temperatures in the 70s. On a morning dog-walk and a lunchtime walk with J, I couldn’t stop snapping photo after photo of tree blossoms, unfolding leaves, swelling buds, and anything green or flowering. After a long and snowy winter, it’s a vegetative resurrection that’s long overdue.

Click here for a photo-set of Easter flowers, buds, and leaves. Enjoy!