My niece and nephew were inducted into the National Honor Society last week, so I wanted to give these amazing young people a shout-out for being such stand-out students in addition to just being such good peeps. It’s not easy growing up in this world – I think it might be the hardest time to be a kid at the rate and the route in which this country is heading.
This variety is probably the most color-saturated and vibrant of our collection, though it lacks in that heavy heavenly peony fragrance – one of nature’s trade-offs I suppose: to get something, you have to give something.
After some painful years, Madonna is poised to return to the pop culture firmament with this delicious introductory slice of her upcoming ‘Confessions II’ album – long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor‘, and her first album of new material sine 2019’s ‘Madame X’. The teaser film featuring tantalizing snippets of music from the first half of the album was just released, and you need to see it below. In addition to some of the most arresting visuals we’ve seen from Madonna in recent years, the music sounds like the perfect accompaniment to a club night out – something this world needs now more than ever, even if it’s largely gone away.
The countdown to the album’s release date July 3, 2026 is officially ticking away, and I cannot wait…
Pink dahlias front and backend this weekly blog recap, and if you’ve missed any of the posts for the past week this is your chance to make up for that, and you should, because they’re all so pretty at this time of the year. (It’s also been a roller coaster of a week, and some of that insanity bled into these posts – enjoy!)
The Itoh peony is a cross between an herbaceous and a tree peony, and it’s a marvelous bridge between the bloom times for each. I also admire its handsome foliage, which stays mildew-free all season long, unlike its diva-like herbaceous cousins. They came into bloom this week, and only lasted a couple of days thanks to the high heat and heavy sun.
It was a quick blooming session – arriving late and leaving early – which is not how I like to roll, but nature won’t be denied. We bend with her, or we break.
The beauty that doesn’t last always feels more beautiful. An unfair act of childish disagreeableness. The steady and stalwart – the flowers that last for more than a season – are too dependable and consistent to be considered more than dull, and there’s something awful about that silliness.
At the edge of the ocean, or at the edge of the land, an art museum sits looking out over a bluff. A garden is situated between the art and the sea, a placement that feels heartwarmingly apt: the garden as a bridge between art and nature. There is a bench for sitting while watching the ocean, but I’m more interested in what’s underneath it all. A patch of creeping thyme is beginning to cover a round rock. The little fuzzy thyme leaves and tiny pink flowers soften the rock’s edges, blurring the border between stone and soil.
This bit of creeping thyme reminds of the power and sway that flowers and beauty can hold over such stalwart things as rock and stone. They defeat by being pretty, gently surrounding a cold gray stone with fuzzy arms of warmth and loveliness. They embrace the immobile and unmoving rock with their love – given without expectation or the hope of love returned. The creep of thyme made beautiful, as in this creep of a song.
Thyme will spend the summer covering this rock, closing around its still stony heart. It offers softness and kindness – shade when it’s sunny and warmth when it’s windy. It is blanket and brother, caretaker and comforter, embrace and enchantress. It only cares to cocoon and love – its adoration feeds upon its own juxtaposition of hot and cold, hard and soft, interest and indifference.
The trilliums cry in the rain… or the trillium’s cry in the rain… and not much differentiation in the misery of either case.
Rain falls to match the mood – melancholy and resignation and regret that reaches back through the years. The trilliums look downtrodden, bowing their heads beneath their burdens. They’ve seen the many tales and travails of love, its tenderness and tenacity, the way it sometimes defies time and space – the way love is always worth the tears. They weep for the sheer beauty and rarity of love in a world so filled with everything but love. They weep from happiness.
The trillium plays many roles in floral folklore. It follows the rule of threes – three leaves, three petals, three sepals. There’s an unconquerable primal aspect to the number three, and trilliums wield this property masterfully. While some have attributed a connection to the Catholic Holy Trinity, the trillium has also been celebrated as a symbol of bisexuality and sexual fluidity. With both male and female reproductive organs (stamen and pistil) technically the trillium flower could fairly be considered bisexual itself – but more recently it’s come to be viewed as a symbol of interconnectedness and connections beyond the strict historical boundaries societally imposed within a male/female binary prison.
The trillium offers another alternative – the idea of a love not bound by time or gender or distance. Which brings us back… centuries back… to a love that at the time dare not speak its name, on a lush lunch gathering just for two.
Two lads.
Two lads on a beautiful, ephemeral spring day – the kind of day you know will never last, so part of you wants to weep, and part of you doesn’t want to be there at all because you know it will never be like this again, and you’re certain you can’t handle the heartbreak of having sipped such loveliness only in order to never have it again, and part of you knows that to not taste of heaven won’t make hell any more bearable when he is gone, so you partake of it – the day, the spring, the lips of a lad who only just said he loved you.
Two lads… and time – a tricky trio, a throubling threesome, if you’ll indulge the wayward bending of words. Time is safely and ruinously their only witness – when the lads have grown old and forgetful, when age has erased the once-indelible grooves of memory – only time will remember them there, beside the trilliums – their laughter, their gaiety, their happiness – the way they slumped gratefully against the trunk of an oak tree, one nuzzling into the neck of the other and closing his eyes, one looking languidly into the distance, into the future, into the nodding heads of the trilliums.
These two lads sat beneath an oak tree centuries ago – an oak tree that must have been in close proximity to a stream or brook or some bit of babbling water that made for easy conversation or none at all. It was so long ago that lads and oak tree are again part of the soft earth that once gave slight way beneath their collective weight on this beautiful spring day. The moss was cool and soft, and nearby a patch of trilliums was in full ephemeral bloom.
Some love survives centuries, cropping up generations later in the petals of a trillium. The tender spot of mossy ground where they once sat together, taking their lunch and laughing, resting from the high heat of the day, shifts and alters under the great bearing wall of time. Watching their ease and intimacy from a distant vantage point of modern-day existence still feels obscene – like we are intruding, even if they cannot see us, even if they are already gone.
What brings two young men to such a point? What connects one human being to another in a way that stills time? Maybe it was as simple as a shared lunch. Maybe it was as easy as the spring day. Maybe it was just that he was he, and he was he.
Who knows every single intricate step it took to reach the state in which they slip into each other’s thoughts so nimbly and easily, the seconds and minutes and hours spent learning and observing, or the specific cadence of expanding affection that led them to this late spring lunch they’re sharing with the trillium?
Love – true love – doesn’t operate or appear by design or planning, nor is it mere destiny or luck. It’s a confoundingly complex series of the smallest moments that eventually coalesce into something more – sometimes friendship, sometimes respect, sometimes basic tolerance – and sometimes, when the world decides to grant us awful humans a momentary reprieve of kindness – sometimes… love.
Behold one of the most enchantingly-monikered flowers out there – the forget-me-not. Little clouds of sky-blue blooms drift at ground level, lending a magical aspect to their blooming season. The forget-me-not likes to re-seed – the ones seen here were found along an informal path in Maine, well outside the bounds of any formal garden scheme. They’ve naturalized a little patch there, and flourished without any apparent care or cultivation. I love a hardy soul that happens to be pretty too.
Folklore and fables have it that the name came about from some suitor who was wooing a woman. Upon picking a bouquet of these flowers he lost his footing and fell into a nearby river, crying out ‘Forget me not!’ as he was carried down to his death. Straight people are so dumb.
Surely there’s a better tale to be told about this exquisite little flower.
Ever since they said that, I post even more flower posts because it was a reminder to do what I want to do here – posts filled with whatever brings me joy mostly – instead of what snarky visitors want me to do. Apologies to those who deserve them.
Here’s yet another flower post because it’s May, and things are beautifully blooming, and I just want to share the prettiness and the joy with the world. It contains a number of favorites:
