It always seemed odd to me to celebrate the start of a new year when we are still locked in winter’s embrace. Yes, I know there’s that whole “now the days are getting longer” thing. But frankly, whether or not the days are getting longer doesn’t seem any more important to me than whether or not the days after getting colder. And on the first day of January, there’s still a lot of cold weather ahead. Brrrrr!
I love flowers.
In the spring and summer, I’m happy to see them outside my windows. The winter, however, is a different story. I can’t afford to have cut flowers around often, and we don’t have many good spots for houseplants, so I usually content myself with forcing paperwhites on a windowsill in the kitchen. A few years ago, I got very ambitious and potted up crocuses, hyacinths, and all sort of other bulbs that require hardening, but they took up a lot of real estate in my refrigerator for a long time, so now I just do paperwhites.
I buy a bag of them in October or November and force just one or two of them at a time, placing them in mason jars with smooth river rocks on the bottom. The first of this year’s bulbs started flowering a couple of weeks ago, right around Thanksgiving, and I expect to have enough bulbs to last until the daffodils start appearing in my yard in the spring.
Some people don’t like paperwhites because of their smell. If you have a whole bunch of them, yes, their fragrance can be cloying. But just one or two at a time produce a mild perfume that wafts through the air and reminds me that green spring will be returning soon.
You know how you see something amazing and take a photo of it, then see that your photo doesn’t look anything like what you saw? (Sunsets are perhaps the most famous example of this sort of thing.)
Well, the other morning, I looked out my dining-room window while Sylvia and I were eating breakfast, and I saw that, seemingly overnight, the trees ringing my backyard had dropped many of their leaves. They’d been green through the unseasonably warm October and early November, and finally started turning a week or so ago. I sort of imagine that the trees, holding on to the last vestiges of summer, were relieved when the cold damp weather came at last, sighed as a huge responsibly was lifted from them, and let themselves start falling asleep for the winter.
When I saw the blanket of newly fallen golden leaves (with plenty of green ones still clinging up high, as you can see–but not for long…) I took a picture of it, thinking it would never look quite like the magical view from my window. But it does (even with a part of the window frame at the top). And I am pleased.
Last week we had summer-like temperatures, but now, as the air is cooling, it’s obvious that autumn is truly here. There are a few flowers left in my yard, such as these anemones, which were planted by my Dutch father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows the Latin names (but not always the English ones) of pretty much every plant in my area (and in lots of other places, too). It’s an autumn-blooming perennial. When I see its stems start to rise from the ground in late summer, I wonder, “Will the flowers arrive before the winter?” And they do–and it’s a joy to see these delicate white blossoms that seem to float in the air.
And then there are the hydrangeas. We have one large plant near the patio and three smaller plants in other places; they all produce blue-green blossoms. I didn’t cut a whole lot of them this year, so the plants are covered with flowers that have been slowly drying out over the past few weeks–fading to pale green and eventually turning into brown paper.
The early days of autumn are always a surprise to me. The river birch along the back fence is one of the first trees to shed its leaves, and it does this even as most of the trees are still quite green. A handful of golden brown leaves scatter themselves across the lawn…and in the blink of an eye, it seems, the grass is obscured by a carpet of leaves (and it’s a thick carpet: last year we composted forty paper lawn bags of shredded leaves) and all the trees are bare.
Just last week, we were still in the middle of summer weather. Then suddenly, a few days shy of the official start of autumn, we’ve jumped into the warm-days-and-cool-nights mix that heralds the changing of the season.
Two nights ago, we pulled out the down comforter.
Yesterday was my first “long pants day” since last May (not counting the fleece pants I wore on chilly nights in Vermont last month).
Today the sun lit up the reddening leaves on one of the dogwood trees in my front yard. There’s green everywhere else–this tree is among the first to get its blossoms in the spring and among the first to lose its leaves in the fall–but autumn is definitely in the air.
I love pattypan squash. Yes, they are delicious. But I like them mostly because they have a cute name (it’s hard to say “pattypan!” without smiling) with an interesting etymology and because they look like little flying saucers.
I also love fresh basil, especially when it’s combined with garlic, pine nuts, freshly grate parmesan, and olive oil. Now that we’ve made the first pesto of the season, the floodgates are open. From here until fall, we may be eating this stuff at least once a week. I sure wouldn’t complain about it…
Every spring, when the forsythias, dogwoods, magnolias, lilacs, azaleas, daffodils, and tulips put on their annual show, I’m reminded of these words penned by Emerson. Of course, this phrase is part of a longer passage about humanity’s inability to escape death, but I still like it in the context of thinking about spring and nature and renewal.
My SP10 hostess, Kerry, has asked everyone in her group to post about their favorite flowers. That’s a really difficult task, because I’d be hard pressed to name a flower I didn’t like. I even find dandelions sort of appealing.
Right now, though, I’d have to say that my favorite flowers are these giant red tulips growing in my front yard. Jan and I moved into this house in the fall a few years ago, and shortly afterward his father, who is Dutch and lives in the Netherlands, came to visit. While he was here, my father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows pretty much everything about plants, planted about three hundred tulip, daffodil, and crocus bulbs around the house, mostly in the front. Squirrels dug up most of the crocuses, but every spring we get to enjoy a magnificent display of yellow and white daffodils, followed by tulips in almost every size and color imaginable.
