Cannas

I wrote recently about hostas, those garden-foliage favorites with dull purple flowers, and how dull they are.

Cannas are the opposite of hostas. They are the opposite of dull and ordinary. They are exciting and unusual.

I first saw them growing alongside my grandmother’s house in Selleck, Washington, back in the 1960s. I found them unbelievable: five-foot stalks with blazing crimson flowers, and gorgeous dark-green foliage.

They are huge and dramatic, and what’s the matter with a little drama in the summertime? They also seem to grow easily; I see them in sidewalk pots all over the city of Providence.

They always make me smile when I see them. Here, in Providence’s Wayland Square, merchants put them in pots, and they thrive.

They are the torches of summertime.

Rejoice in them.

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Finding out what the yellow flowers are called

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I walk to work most days. Some days I walk all the way, which takes about thirty minutes. Most days I ride the Providence trolley with Partner; I get off on Wickenden Street, which is about a fifteen-minute walk from my office.

 

 

I walk past a florist, and a used-record store, and a couple of restaurants and bars, and a hardware store, and two coffeeshops, and a pizzeria, and an art-supply store.

 

 

Then I walk through a field of flowers.

 

 

I-195 used to run through the center of Providence. They rerouted it a few years ago. All of the former interstate-highway space is now a green boggy wilderness, full of weeds and flowers. (Rhode Island is largely swampland, so there’s a lot of squashy reedy ground reasserting itself too; geese are returning in large numbers, and those geese are mean.)

 

 

In the green space, there are yellow flowers, and white flowers, and yellow, and purple. I recognize some of them: carpet bugle, and butter-and-eggs, and milkweed, and even Jimson weed. There’s chicory, and vetch, and mullein. 

 

 

But there are a few I don’t know.

 

 

Some are yellow, on long spindly stalks. Some are small purple flowers on short stalks. Some are white, and small, and subtle.

 

 

Hm.

 

There’s an Ursula LeGuin short story called “The Day Before The Revolution.” It’s about an old woman, Laia, who has inspired a revolution, but is now too old to care about it: all she can think about is her own past, and her dead husband, and the moments of joy in her life.

 

 

At the end of the story, she goes upstairs to her room to rest, and probably to die. On the way,  she looks out the window at a field of yellow flowers, the same flowers in which she lay down with her husband for the first time. And the last line is: “Eighty-five years, and she never had time to find out what the yellow flowers were called.”

 

 

I understand this.

 

 

I want to find out what the yellow flowers in the green field are called, before it's too late.

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Lilacs

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I was walking the other day at lunchtime when one of my co-workers called over to me: “The lilacs are blooming over there.”

 

 

She gestured over at the animal-rescue place across the street, which has a flowery hedge. And their lilacs were in full bloom.

 

 

Lilacs (well, Syringa if you're a snob) send me into reverie every spring.  The house I lived in when I was very small had a lilac hedge; they were all purple except one, which was creamy heavenly white. The scent was heavenly also. It’s heavy and can be oppressive (I wore lilac scent for a while some years ago, and was probably the bane of the office), but – in small doses, and when you smell it on the breeze on an April day – it’s wonderful.

 

 

They remind me of Walt Whitman, and the death of Abraham Lincoln, by way of “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”

 

 

They remind me of Milton Berle, who camped it up on the old “Batman” TV series as the dandy gangster Louie the Lilac.

 

 

They remind me of New Hampshire, which uses the lilac as its floral symbol, and good for them.

 

 

I think they were probably one of the first flowers I ever examined closely. I remember wondering at those huge clusters of much smaller flowers, and having a dim intuition that it was very smart of the lilac bush to make big floral explosions out of hundreds of smaller blossoms.

 

 

They are lovely.

 

 

Admire them while they last.

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All the pretty little flowers!

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The weather this week has been unbelievably warm for Rhode Island in March.  Monday, the last day of winter, was mid-70s and balmy; I walked to the downtown library at lunchtime and had to take off my Mister Rogers sweater when I got back to the office.

 

 

(I say not a word about climate change.  Not a word. I said to Partner the other evening: It’s done.  There’s nothing that can be done at this point, nothing more to be said.  The climate’s changing.  We may as well use up all the fossil fuels as fast as we can, because it won’t make a bit of difference. Oh kids. I hope we’ve got a couple of decades left before we all go phffft.)

 

 

The vegetation hereabouts – I can’t even tell you.  It’s in total confusion.  I think the snowdrops committed suicide, I never saw them bloom.  The big witch-hazel tree on the corner of East Manning and Ives is still squeezing out red/yellow blossoms, even though it usually blooms in the January snow.  The crocus (croci?) are on fast-forward: the leaves came up, then the buds swelled and bloomed in a day or two, and now they’re drooping in the heat.  Daffodils realized that it must be spring and bloomed almost literally overnight.  Tulips are leaping up a month early.  Vinca is already blooming (doesn’t it usually wait until May?).  The magnolias on the Brown campus are blooming here and there.  Forsythia is coming out.  The violets in the lawn outside aren’t blooming yet, but the leaves are turning peculiar colors.

 

 

(But most of the trees aren’t budding yet.  It’s a strange combination: sunny warm balmy weather, flowers in the grass, and no leaves on the trees.)

 

 

(And I see on Facebook from my friends in the Northwest that it’s snowing.  In mid-March!  In the warm sweet welcoming Northwest!)

 

 

Everyone’s predicting a hot humid summer.  I don’t know.  I’m picturing one of those stormy summers, with a thunderstorm every evening and lots of hurricanes gestating in the Caribbean.

 

 

But who knows?

 

 

Enjoy the pretty flowers, kids.  Enjoy the pretty flowers.

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