This pair of magenta blooms is currently lighting up the garden – the first is a brilliant rose campion – small of stature and size, its color is so potent it shows itself from any distance, piercing through the green surroundings with its clarion-call. The second is a smaller monarda – bee balm – that was a bit of a lark when I planted it a couple of years ago, and it’s come back again. I like a survivor. And I love this color.
Despite having been obsessed with houseplants since I was a wee lad, I’ve never gotten into Hoyas. They seem to inspire a fervid passion in certain plant collectors and enthusiasts, but they’ve largely avoided my interest. I’ve never been a huge fan of the trailing houseplant – the trellises they enjoy too often read as clutter in my annoying Virgo’s mind. Lately, however, I’ve been charmed by the Hoya’s winning attributes – their flowers and pretty leaves, the way some of their nectar is sweet, how some of their perfume is intoxicating. The wide variety of cultivars and forms are also infinitely interesting. Coming into a new interest and passion well past the halfway mark of life is a reminder of how much excitement there is yet to be had in new discoveries.
A few weeks ago I procured my very first Hoya – the Hoya pubicalyx. It’s a very little plant at the moment, the better to acclimate and raise it from the very beginning. In certain houseplant folklore, the Hoya is considered to be a symbol of everlasting affection, love, and protection of home. All good things in this treacherous world.
Way back when I was planning this website over two decades ago, blogs were relatively new. I had grandiose and impossibly-ridiculous ideas of how I wanted ALANILAGAN.com to appear, none of which was possible. First, I wanted ambient music in the background and shifting light schemes. Second, I wanted fragrance, pumped out of everyone’s computer to complement whatever the current blog post was. Third, I wanted smoke (well, just some water vapor) to accompany the fragrance. I was going for an entire sensory experience. After discussions with my first webmaster, none of those wishes would come to be granted (or even possible) so I compromised and took up the challenge of writing the atmosphere I wanted to convey.
Since that time, many advances have been made on the website front, but I still can’t emit fragrance or smoke from your lap top or phones. That means this blog post on jasmine blooms must be a thing of description, a thread of words to wind its way into your mind versus your nose. A sweet classic white floral, jasmine’s perfume is tempered by a freshness, an element of green that keeps it from becoming too cloying, too sweet. It’s difficult to capture that outside of the natural scent, so I’m not a big fan of perfumes that proclaim to be jasmine – only the real deal will do. And maybe that’s something I should have realized from the beginning – there is just no approximating certain fragrances, and my initial attempt to do so was probably best left unfulfilled.
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.
If not, let’s make one up.
A new romance. A new history. A new tale to tell the world.
Something not to be forgotten…
Someone once complained that there are too many flower posts here.
Which means that someone is reading this blog when I’m not reading theirs.
(I don’t even know if they have one.)
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:
Some hibiscus are happy – in their bright faces, their super-saturated hues, their splendor and magnificence.
Some hibiscus are bashful, hiding behind their foliage and barely peeking out from their ruffled curtains of petals.
And some are happiest when paired off and sitting beside their mate.
When someone is completely and totally who they are meant to be, it’s a glorious thing to see, probably because it doesn’t seem to happen all that often. I’m certainly nowhere near that, though I’d be bold enough to claim I’m getting closer. Still much more work to be done, more to be figured out, even at my advanced age.
Only flowers and plants and trees seem to have it all figured out, and even they are prone to evolution and change – a shifting global environment is forcing that into happening as unfair as that might be. Leave it to humans to fuck everything up with global warming. Nature laid down finite and beautiful laws, but human nature is too often infantile and stupid. We ruin all the good things, sometimes sheerly out of boredom. What a sad set of circumstances… and so I retreat to the irrefutable safety of beauty – and the beauty of the natural world, such as found in this exquisite passionflower bloom.
The passionflower wants nothing more than to climb and bloom and spread its maypops to animals who might eat and later deposit its seeds elsewhere. The passionflower doesn’t worry about dying, it simply goes through its life-cycle one day at a time. I caught this one in glorious bloom, beginning its enticement of the bees to come by and pollinate, but if that doesn’t happen, the plant still flowers, it still produces this beautiful vision. A valiant effort, worth all its work, and we are lucky enough to see it happen.
This spring I didn’t go overboard with our patio planting scheme. A few salvias and hummingbird favorites – which are working as we’ve already seen our first hummingbird of the season – a pot of papyrus (with the drainage holes mostly blocked to keep its feet wet) – and a few pots of colorful annuals, including this little purple guy, are about all I could muster.
Missing are our usual showstoppers like petunias and coleus and sweet potato vines, so this purple beauty will have to put on the brunt of the floral fireworks, along with a lone begonia. This sleepy spring has been slow to wake – no word on whether summer will follow suit.
The hummingbirds are already here, though, and I’m taking solace in that.
A flower fills the afternoon post, for when there are no words.
These columbine blooms recall this post from earlier in the spring, a time that feels so close and already so far. A fancier and more petalicious white version of Columbine may be found here – proof that there’s a blog post for everything. When I think on that, it feels exhausting. We all live so many lives, mostly without even realizing it. One life is never just one life.
How strange that such a pretty flower elicits such difficult thoughts. Try getting your head around something like the multiverse. Younger people do it with ease, but they’re afraid of other things. Older people can make sene of it if they think long enough on it, but who wants to think very long on anything these days? For those of us somewhere in the middle – of life, of death, of the past and present – there’s something between grace and acceptance, a balance that is precariously perched on the bloom of the columbine, and such prettiness was never meant to last.
There is something special about the very first peony bloom of the season – that initial intake of its perfume is a collision of beauty, nostalgia, and all the hope of summer to come. It brings me back to Suzie’s childhood birthday parties, to the garden in her side-yard, where I’d escape when the other kids proved to be too much for me to take. Despite the risk of ants in the blooms, I’d always lean over and deeply inhale their magnificent fragrance.
The Itoh peonies are full of bud and ready to burst, but that’s a show for another day. For now, this one single peony is enough. An old-fashioned bloom who is nameless but no less beautiful in its anonymity.
This azalea grows in downtown Albany, on a little side walkway that most people rarely use, which makes it a favorite thoroughfare of mine. Its colours – that brilliant magenta against a forest of bright chartreuse – make for a combustible combination, one that has thrilled me since I was a child. Here, it sets itself aflame in the more beautiful manner – harbinger of a fiery season to come.
What floral fireworks await us for the upcoming summer season? Time will tell, and this year I’m simply going with the flow and enjoying the moments as they unfold. There’s less stress and more fun in that. May unfurls her splendor by the day, sometimes by the hour, as weather and moods shift dramatically. These blooms bring the drama to match such an emotional rollercoaster.
As for spring, there’s still some more of it, so let’s make the most of it while it lasts – it’s been such a lovely journey thus far, and I don’t quite want it to end…
While magnolias are too big and messy for our little yard, I have always admired them from afar, and I still thrill at their blooming season when it rolls around – always too quickly, always torn asunder by 90-degree heat or wind-driven rain. When they are in bloom however, it is a glorious sight, one that restores a dwindling faith in the power of beauty.
When I was a kid, our neighbors two houses down had a magnificent magnolia tree in their backyard. I would sneak through the woods behind our houses and estimate how far I had to go to find their yard, then emerge on the edge of their property, spying the magnolia tree in full resplendent bloom. I would stay there, close to the ground, transfixed with wonder and amazement at this stately tree absolutely overflowing with rich blooms marbled and mottled with pink, along with a delicate fragrance delivered on the breeze. Sometimes the ground would be wet with spring, and my pants would be soaked by the time I got back home; I never cared because glimpsing the magnolia blooms fed my soul for the whole following winter.
Bane of our lawn’s existence, I still have a soft spot in my heart for these little violets that still manage to break through in the spring despite all the treatments. When I was little, behind our family home was a little stretch of woods, and behind the black iron gate of the pool, a swath of these violets had naturalized and provided an enchanting carpet that was lit up with purple and white violet blooms each spring.
The variegated white and purple variety was far more ubiquitous, but I always coveted the more rare pure violet blooms like the one seen here.
Boys didn’t pick violets in forests when I was little; I was a strange creature that way, and I saw no shame in it. Under the spell of spring beauty, I spent my afternoons walking in the forest, entranced and enchanted by the plants and the light and the slippery salamanders that hid under the larger rocks.
That I’m weighed down by your beautiful
Collapsing underneath your perfect
Drowning in your wonderful
And I’m letting you sink in
It’s, it’s almost unbearable
I’m suffering inside your magic
Love you something terrible
And I’m letting you sink in
And I’m letting you sink in
A violet for your thoughts seems a more precious deal than a penny.
I would always take that deal.
Anything for a flower, always more pretty than a penny, even if they didn’t last.
Maybe because they didn’t last.
Almost everyone loves lilacs – some common trigger of childhood nostalgia and spring’s ephemeral enchantment – but not everyone knows how to cut them for a bouquet. Lilacs are one of the trickier ones too, ever-ready to droop and fall in mere hours, but they can last if you follow a few helpful tips.
First, go out and pick your lilacs first thing in the morning, ideally before the sun has started to beat down and take away some of the plant’s moisture. If you can’t manage that, wait until the evening, when it’s had some time to replenish its fluids.
Second is how to strip the stems – I usually make two vertical cuts in a cross, about two inches into the branch’s bottom. That’s usually messy enough to strip some of the bark off in the process but if it doesn’t, peel some back manually. That should allow for maximum intake of water through the bottom of the branches. Finally, remove most of the leaves, as they will take away from the water pull to the flowers (they also tend to wilt no matter how fussy you get about the stems).
Usually this is enough to get you a decent vase life – sometimes you have to give it a second go, so repeat the process if they start wilting in a couple of days. Otherwise, simply inhale and enjoy.
