Category Archives: Flowers

You’ve seen them everywhere, but probably never gave much thought or notice to them. They’re there when you arrive, and there when you leave, and they share your most intimate restaurant moments: listening in, nodding their pretty little heads, and remaining absolutely mum long after you’ve departed with your dishy dining mate. They are the little bouquets of flowers that adorn many restaurant tables. Generally made up of a single rose or, far worse, some carnations or alstroemeria, they more often than not strike me as sad and failed attempts at bringing the idea of beauty into an eating space, while not actually providing any.

Occasionally, though, they do work, and mostly by accident. When the happy coupling such as the one featured here occurs, my heart gets a little giddy – as much for the perfection and simplicity of such beauty as for the unexpected nature of the chance encounter. We get so little, sometimes, that when it’s there, even in the tiniest of bouquets, it means something more.

These are from the Columbus Avenue location of House of Siam, where the goodness of the Thai dishes is just as vibrant and delicious as this little floral grouping.

Sometimes the sun comes up from the ground,

in the circular bloom of a Black-eyed Susan,

or the saucer-like blossom of the cup plant.

The super-saturated yellow lit from behind,

standing up to the heat of the day

without wilt or complaint.

It is the embodiment of summer,

of sun and heat and a season of growth.

It is a celebration.

Happiness is a flower in the sunlight.

Happiness is a summer day.

Happiness is the month of August.

The stunning simplicity of a flower that echoes the sun,

backed and buoyed by the green of sustenance and life,

will always be a wonder to behold.

The heart bursts with joy

at these explosions of a summer

that’s not quite ready to give up.

Named rather obviously, if whimsically, for Queen Ann’s Lace, these tenacious wildflowers were a little too hardy and invasive for me to quite embrace as a child, but I’m coming around to them. In the Northeast, they are troopers in the extremes of weather we get here, surviving the winters with a long tap root and a hardiness at odds with their delicate appearance. I always knew of their survival instincts, I even saw them laugh in the face of fire.

In the fall of that year, a dried bouquet of seeds, intact in the skeletal umbrel of the flowerhead, had made its way into our garden, where it became brittle and bone dry. It was an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt at transplanting one from the wild. As a rather dangerous experiment in easier brush removal, I lit one of them on fire, watching the seeds explode and disperse and then forgetting about them over winter. The next spring, a mass of fernlike seedlings had cropped up in the area, more than I have ever gotten when intentionally tending patches of perfectly-planted seeds. I knew then that this queen was far from fragile.

She is a signifier of summer, standing up to the most oppressive heat in the road-side stretches she favors. She also makes a decent cut flower, although when picked at high heat of day, she sometimes tend to droop, and may never recover. As with many things, timing is crucial. Earliest morning, preferably after a few days of restorative rain, is the ideal window.

The cream-colored lace, and soft green foliage, reminds me of summer. As heat-horny insects buzzed in hidden leafy canopies, and the sun moved directly overhead, the lace remained refined and elegant. It nodded its floriferous carriage, held stalwart in the face of strong winds and rains, and perhaps its very airy nature allowed it to deal with forces that would have crushed more solid floral forms. The lace of a queen sometimes needs to be as strong as it is pretty.

For many years, I eschewed white flowers. Too bland, too boring, too dull, too whatever – I always felt they were less exciting than their more colorful counterparts. Why choose white when you could have a bright fiery red? As time has gone on, however, I’ve traded in the need for bold pizazz and find myself enjoying the softness of the palest of shades. Here’s a brief, and eclectic, collection of white flowers. They run the gamut from the earliest trillium to the season-ending anemone. I like being smack-dab in the middle of them.

From a furry gray-green rosette comes these shooting stars of magenta. A variety of Lychnis, these hardy little performers are prolific re-seeders, with poppy-like seedpods that act as miniature salt-and-pepper shakers, dispersing their seeds generously. As biennials, they produce a mound of soft foliage the first year, then send up these powerful bursts of saturated blooms in their second. While I’m not enamored of their spindly form, I am in absolute love with their blazing color. Not many flowers match this sort of intensity, and despite their small size the sheer volume of the hue is turned up so high it can be seen from across the yard. Sometimes little things pack a powerful punch, and at the time of the year when a number of flowers are jockeying for the spotlight, this little lychnis manages to steal the show.

Reminiscent of sherbet or sorbet in shade only, this tree peony bloom actually smells of a spicy tea. Though the scale of the flower is unknown in these shots, it’s immense – the size of a small plate. So big is it that the stems don’t practically support its weight. I always end up clipping the blooms and bringing them inside, where the pungent perfume can be enjoyed up close.

The bloom is an ever-changing and evolving show of its own. Just when you think it’s achieved its full bomb size, it reaches a little higher and expands a little wider, revealing an inner shade of ruby red at the throat of each petal. I love a hidden heart.

I don’t know the exact origin of the common name of the forget-me-not. I’ve always liked it, and over the years I’ve made up my own background stories, so I’d not rather ruin any of those scenarios just yet. If you’re interested, Google it yourself, you lazy bum. Here’s photo of a nice specimen taken when I was last in Maine. I planted a few of these at my childhood home, and though technically these are biennials, they managed to re-seed to extend their presence for more than a few years. Eventually they faded out. It would be easy enough to re-seed, but I don’t live there anymore, and I don’t like their unreliability for where I am now.

Like other unreliable yet pretty plants, I enjoy them more in the gardens of other people than I do in my own. For that reason, I also value them a little more. We always want what is just out of reach. The elusive adds its appeal to everything. If the common dandelion were rarer and less hardy, it would be celebrated, printed on pillows and curtains and tablecloths, deified in its scarce glory.

Suzie recently said that peonies reminded her of her childhood home on Locust Avenue. It’s one of my favorite memories too. That was my favorite garden growing up. It had a couple of small man-made ponds (that never seemed to be full), a rough stairway of rocks that led further into its expansive beds, and a grape arbor that was covered in seemingly inedible grapes. (Always too green or too sour, but the arbor, with two white seats beneath its shaded canopy, was enchanting regardless.) Suzie once shared her grape taffy with me under that arbor on a hot summer day.

The rest of the garden was at its peak at this time of the year. A sprawling patch of Centaurea montana buzzed with bees slurping the sweetly-scented blossoms and pollinating bloom to bloom. Beds of bearded iris, with their spiky swords of foliage and spicy perfume, battled beds of daylilies, whose day-long beauty had not yet begun to fight. There was a formally dramatic circle of hosta around a sundial, and a row of mockorange that perfumed the balmy air. A gnarled fringe tree sat near the front of the property, unassumingly sprinkling its fine fragrance around the driveway’s edge.

For good reason, the family gatherings at the Ko house utilized the flatter and more expansive side found on the other end of the house for birthday parties and such. This is where we would assemble for several of Suzie’s birthdays, for three-legged races and other games. I’d usually stay close to my brother until my shyness subsided, and Suzie and I had a more familial bond that made me feel closer to her than her other friends, but by the end of every party I was happy and at ease, and it was more often than not difficult to leave because of all the fun we were having.

Still, I’d prefer time alone with Suzie over group mayhem any day. (That damn Becky ended up crying and annoying everyone to no end, and for no reason!) Which brings me back to the garden.

The garden was more intimate and private – a more appropriate place for weddings (where two would later take place) and for quieter walks and contemplation. A grand beech (or was it elm?) tree rose to provide shade for a large part of the space, while the more-open sunnier spaces allowed for bounteous beds of peonies – and this is the place where our first memories of that gorgeous flower were forged. I remember walking up to them – they were almost as tall as me – and leaning my head into their perfumed heads. He little ants that sipped on their sugary dew-like drops were too small to scare me, and were easily flicked off with a finger. In the sun, the blooms went slightly paler than they would in the shade, but the fragrance was just as powerful.

During most of my visits to see Suzie in the summer, we’d somehow end up walking in the garden. I was always amazing at her unimpressed nonchalance about the whole magical place. Though I suppose that’s Suzie. (This was, after all, the girl who merely shrugged when she was informed her dog Duchess had been run over by a car.) In the garden, she paused as I ticked off the scientific names of the plants, but seemed generally uninterested. I guess we all take our backyards for granted.

On this day, I remember the friend who shared her grape taffy beneath a grape arbor, who shut my finger in a car window en route to Mary Poppins, who almost laughed us to death while snorkeling with a bazillion fish, who saw Madonna with me for the first time (and every time since), and who never batted an eye at the insanity that sometimes came infused my mad existence. That kind of acceptance and love is how a family should be.

Happy Birthday Suzie! (See you tonight – and you have Milo to thank if there’s a peanut-butter and jelly birthday cake!)