Ephemeral

or A Moment of 'Meh'

A fever that lasts for a day—that's what ephemeral used to mean.  In the 14th century it was a medical term to describe illnesses of short duration.  Only later, over the course of several hundred years, did the meaning of something gone in a flash extend to flowers and insects and experiences.  (I do like a word with a past.)

When we talk about "spring ephemerals" I wonder idly sometimes whether we're really referring to the season's colorful, short-lived flowers, or whether we're back to human fevers that last for a day.  Such heady, dizzy excitement for this flash-in-the-pan experience—like gold fever, only without the prospectors and picks and mules and claim-jumpers and boom towns.  (But other than that, just the same.)  We work ourselves up to fever pitch when those first leaves appear and savor every minute of growth and bud and bloom.  We know that a few too many weeks of yellowing leaves will follow, but they will have been worth it for the short-lived, intense enjoyment of those flowers.  What we don't want is to work ourselves into a state of hopeful excitement for something that turns out to be—

But let's start with the enjoyment.  Take the Lady Jane tulips (again).  (Apparently, they are not really Tulipa clusiana, in case that matters.*)  As buds and half-open flowers, they exude delicious elegance.

When they open fully, though, their secret life as wildflowers is divulged, and they have a kind of carefree rough-and-tumble to them that I love.

The weeks of anticipation are worth the few days of pleasure—Lady Janes are beautiful for every minute until they pass their prime.

The 'Persian Pearls' (T. humilis) only last for four or five days and then efface themselves quickly, leaves and all.  If none of their blooming days falls on a weekend, I don't get to see them open in the sunshine, but never mind.  Just knowing that they can outshine stained glass and that I might see them doing so makes up for a disappointing year now and then.  You live them up when you can.

But now we come to the Tulipa tardas.  I had such high hopes for these small flowers (they only get two to four inches high).  The buds were promising, with a complex array of glowing colors.

But then the flowers turned out to be a bit of a mess.

Granted, they are luminous in the sun, and anyone lying flat on the concrete patio can certainly enjoy that effect to the full.

When they open—at high noon, for half an hour or so— (what more do they want than a full morning of high desert sunshine?), they're mighty cheerful, as you can tell if you're standing directly over them and looking straight down. 

From the Adirondack chair on the patio, though, you mostly just see mess.  I feel a bit disillusioned.  Spring flowers are not supposed to leave you with a feeling of...well, for lack of a better word, meh.

I don't usually adopt the latest words of the moment.  Not out of principle or anything; they're just ephemeral enough that by the time I figure out what they mean they've begun to fade from popularity anyway.  But a flash (in the pan) of insight today suggested that "meh" was just made for unimpressive tulips.  Both of them are here and then gone, without anyone getting too worked up either way.  I can handle that tepid, evanescent nothingness in a word—not all words can have the longevity of "ephemeral," after all.

But I don't see the point of it in a tulip.

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* The long stems of Darwin and other hybrid tulips often break in the spring winds around here, so regional growers recommend wildflower or species tulips instead.   (For what it's worth.)

Soft

or A Pleasantly Unvarnished Truth

The word "soft" takes up a lot of space in the dictionary.  It's a broad-shouldered, good-natured word, and so naturally ends up doing a lot of extra work.  A quick glance down the list of definitions shows that most of the work is pleasant, at any rate, even relaxing.  Soft can mean:  pleasing, agreeable; bringing ease, comfort, or quiet; mellow, subdued, gentle, smooth, delicate; balmy, mild or clement; not violent; demanding little work or effort; leisurely, curved, unassuming, low-key; marked by kindness or tenderness... Such lovely ideas, all redolent of ease, and all wrapped up in that one word, "soft."

'Lady Jane' tulips and grape hyacinths

One of the things I love most about spring is that it gives us back the gift of shade.  All winter the east-facing patio and garden are sunny and comfortable in the morning but off-limits for casual enjoyment after noon.  In the morning, the sun is happy to tell tall tales and let you pretend that the temperature is much warmer than it actually is.  Then it crosses the roofline and leaves you with shade, which always tells the cold, unvarnished truth.   Shade sends you inside to put on another sweater and behave yourself.

In spring the shade has kinder truths to tell.  Unseasonably warm weather this week has made the patio a comfortable place to sit again in the afternoons, to work the crossword puzzle, draft a blog post, watch the goldfinches.  But the biggest enjoyment has been the soft light of shade—not the glow of winter sun or the blare of summer, not the dark shadows against the north-facing wall, marked off from the sunlight by a straight, hard line, but the gentle, even light of New Mexico's ambient brightness.

In winter the sun is our haven; in summer we take refuge in shade.  In spring both sun and shade are equally soft—they are mild, clement places to enjoy the soft colors, soft fragrances, soft temperatures.

No other refuge is necessary.

Reading between the Lines

or Histories

You'd think that anything written on a scroll of papyrus would bristle with the wisdom and experience of ancient cultures:  chronicles of might and conquest, disputes on philosophical matters, records of scientific discoveries.  Tales of battle and love among the gods, or maybe gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior in high places—those would be OK, too.  While there's a fair amount of all that, a lot of papyri are plain old financial records.  Household accounts.  Numbers and lists.  They were just thrown out on the ancient Egyptian dust heaps, there to await discovery by future generations.  (And 2,000-year-old Egyptian dust heaps must by now be very dusty indeed.)

To romantics, lists of income and expense don't have much appeal.  To historians, though, they're meat and drink.  When you find out how people made and spent money, you find out something about what they valued, how they ran their households, what they ate.  You might not learn much about that culture's most epic achievements, but by reading between the lines you can learn a lot about what people did every day, and what their lives were like.

Sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes)

I was thinking about papyrus and scrolls (and Piroulines) while looking at new growth in the sand lovegrass.  Young shoots are beginning to come in with enthusiasm, and they are a bright, lively, unscarred green.  The wide blades of fresh grass hardly resemble last year's growth, though.  The older blades curled inward as they dried; each one is ridged and hollowed.  Seasonal death took each blade and seed stalk in a unique way, giving the old growth texture and character.  It has a history, a tale to tell.

Tales aren't only the province of the old, of course.  Many of the bright young things in the garden have stories of their own.  This crocus, for example, lost part of a petal, on only its second day of blooming.  (I don't know how long that is in crocus years.)

Crocus tomasiniana 'Ruby Giant'

What happened?  What hungry insect stopped in for a bite, or what wind took advantage of a weak spot to shear the petal off as it opened in the sun? 

This tulip, too, has already had a hard-knock life:

Tulipa praestans 'Shogun'

It hasn't even gotten around to budding yet, but its leaves are battered and misshapen, especially compared to the pristine curves of its neighbors.  What happened to it, all those inches underground, between its fall planting and the day it broke the surface a few weeks ago?  What obstacle did it struggle against as it grew?  I know about as much as if I were looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs with no Rosetta Stone to guide me.  A story lies within, but what?  Without knowing the language of flowers, I can't read between the lines. 

What do they matter anyway, the small stories of the daily lives of plants?  What do they matter, any more than the daily lives of people who lived so many centuries ago?  What difference does knowing the price of lentils in ancient Egypt make to the price of lentils today?  Maybe none.  But maybe, knowing that someone went to market and paid hard-earned cash for food, thinking about menus and servings and the possibility of leftovers, maybe knowing that could ignite some spark of realization—an insight, a sense of connection, of continuity.

The sense that in some small way, we are akin.

Revving Up the Engines

or Why Gardening Is Like Drag Racing.  And Cats.

Licorice mint (Agastache rupestris)

Just because you're not moving, that doesn't mean you're resting.  You might even be lying on a comfy sofa, but reclining isn't the same as relaxing.  Instead of feeling the tension melting out of your neck and shoulders, your muscles softening, jaw slackening, mind drifting, as you float one easy breath away from sleep, you could be gathering your resources for some course of action—planning a new project, nagging yourself about an old one, debating possibilities, thinking through ways and means.

Tulipa sylvestris

 I was watching Sir Marley a while ago.  He had designs on a mourning dove—a nice, fat one resting under the bird feeder in the vague stupor mourning doves do so well.  Sir Marley stayed perfectly still, but you could see him working the math problems in his head:  measuring distances, calculating trajectories, accounting for wind speed.  Once all the equations worked out, he began, in the mysterious, motionless way of cats, to gather himself together.  Energy at the ready, spine taut, he slowly shifted his weight.  Ever so slightly, his back paws began to twitch.  From stasis he went instantly for the POUNCE.

And missed.  (Vague stupors 1 - Math problems 0.)

Likewise, drag racers at the start line may just be sitting there, but they're not idling.  Their engines are revving up, roaring like Sir Marley only wishes he could.  When the starting signal flicks from amber to green, off they go like a shot, burning rubber all the way.  (And that's everything I know about drag racing.)

Blue flax (Linum lewisii)

At least where gardening is concerned (and in this climate, where the ground doesn't freeze), I've stopped thinking of winter as the dormant season—the gathering season is more like it.  Just because the garden isn't leafing and budding, that doesn't mean that it's at rest.  Winter is a time for plants to draw resources together, to build them up bit by bit, to rev up the power and get it humming, so that when spring comes, bam!  They can take off like a shot.

Those tiny leaves at the base of the licorice mint and the flax are the botanical equivalents of a cat's back feet.  They haven't begun twitching yet—the plants are still doing the math problems, measuring the angle of the sun and the hours of daylight, calculating chlorophyll-to-carbohydrate ratios, plotting their growth trajectories—but in another few weeks, they'll begin in their own motionless, mysterious way, to gather themselves together for the pounce.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here surrounded by gardening books, old catalogs, and internet printouts doing my own plotting and planning.  Don't think my feet aren't starting to twitch.

Mine aren't the only ones...

End Runs

or Fooling Old Man Winter

I think of it as my "stealth gardening" outfit—the multiple layers of black that make sitting in the sun enjoyable this time of year.  In summer black gets hot enough that it almost burns you.  In December, as long as you're out of the wind, it keeps you roasty-toasty, especially in a small, walled garden.  This weekend the temperature was only about 30°F when I went outside in the mornings, but wearing black in the sunshine let me make an end run around the cold.

Gardening is like dressing to outwit winter in a way—a set of tricks of the trade that let you make the most of nature's gifts while circumventing its extremes.  You grow things that will thrive in your climate, but you also water new plantings more carefully than nature would so that they grow deep, strong root systems.  You loosen and amend the soil.  And you mulch.

Since losing a fair amount of newly laid pecan shell mulch in a recent windstorm, I've been stealthily tracking the portions of it that just went into hiding to their lairs:  in the mess of suckering growth beneath the largest sand cherry, tucked into the corner with the scariest spider webs (why couldn't they blow away?) beneath the blue bench, or drifted up against the grasses.  I coax it out with a gentle hand fork and then rehome it to the barest spots.  It's not much insulation, but it might be enough to fool Old Man Winter if he doesn't look too closely.

As I was sidling around the garden hunting for errant patches of mulch, I spotted this in the central bed:

One of the sylvestris tulips (I think) is coming up—actually, quite a number of them are.  I've never grown them before so don't know if they normally break ground before the first day of winter or if this is jumping the gun.  Did I plant them too shallowly? too early? too late?  I'm not sure whether they have a clever strategy for making an end run around winter or whether they're trying to steal a base—to sneak over to third while the pitcher isn't looking.  If the latter, I'm dubious.  How often does that succeed?

You can do a lot to trick Old Man Winter, but I don't know if he's going to fall for this one.

From the Sidelines

 

or Between the Rests

Someone, it seems, has been overdoing it in the garden.  I've been sidelined again this week by CFS, and have spent most of the last few days alternating between bed, sofa-and-laptop, and the Adirondack chair on the patio.  The restfulness has been critical, but in between lie-downs, I've been walking the (fortunately very short) path around the garden.  It's been a bit like playing the harp part in an orchestral piece—pages of rest, then a few brief, colorful notes, and then pages of rest.

The garden is that way, too, at the moment—little flurries of activity amid plenty of open space.  While the perennials are beginning to fill back in after their late-winter trimming, and the ground covers, though taking their own sweet time, are starting actually to cover the ground (impatiently, I begin to understand the impulse to plant invasives—bishop's weed would have solved this problem long ago), the effect is still a splash of color against an empty backdrop.  I would make a note to myself to plant more bulbs next fall, but a) I would lose it and b) I will plant more anyway.

In a way, however, planting more might be defeating the purpose.  The harp, after all, is a coloristic instrument in the orchestra—its effect depends in part on the relative rarity of its use.  The splashes of color in the garden grab my attention in the way that a whole swath, or a bed, or a field, might not; I know each tulip in each patch, when it first broke ground, when it started to bloom, when it reached its prime, which of its leaves get in the way of the camera.  (I grow species tulips, as their stems are either short or flexible enough to withstand the spring winds here, and they bloom early enough to please the bees even more than usual.  But the leaves do get in the way.)

Don't get me wrong—I miss being active without counting the cost, more than I can tell you.  I wouldn't mind being a violinist—even a second violinist—in the orchestra for a change, rather than the harpist, just for the sake of doing something, even though really, the part itself might not be any more interesting.  But these splashes of activity in the midst of rest do have their meaning.  The pleasure of being home for our first thunderstorm of the season, when the first rain (rain!  0.03 inches of rain!) fell in 64 long, dry days, is one I won't soon forget.

I suppose it's all about context.  Rain in between dry spells means a lot more than rain in a gray spring full of showers.  When quietness is the norm, you learn to savor moments of fullness:  the rain, the flowers, the experiences—

all the things that happen in between the rests.

Mezzo piano

or Soft Focus

Nothing in the world sounds quite like a high school marching band, and very perplexed it made me to hear one while I was outside watering the seedlings yesterday afternoon.  It was quite a good band, as these things go—well in tune, fairly precise, plenty of pizzazz—but a bit out of the blue.  As far as I know, no high school lurks in the neighborhood waiting to spring its marching band on innocent passers-by, and bands don't usually appear out of thin air.  A nearby park occasionally hosts special events, and perhaps this was one of them.

Trombones, trumpets, piccolos, snare drums; the bass drum driving them all along, holding them all together—hot sounds and loud, sounds that surprised me on a cool March day.  The park hosts a summer concert series, and on July evenings I often hear occasional strains of salsa, swing, blues—hot brass, hot guitar licks, hot driving rhythms.  Then, the bright sounds partner well with a summer sunset, with the summer flowers in the garden—neon pink autumn sage, orange marigolds, red geraniums—flowers with saturated colors intense enough to stand up to the southwestern sun, our famously clear light.

New Mexico does intensity well, and that makes the gentle days of spring like today, when the winds die down and the marching bands stay home, all the more precious.  These afternoons hum along at a mezzo piano, a moderate quietness, that is a little more familiar to people in greener lands.  For a few short weeks, the sun is neither so low in the sky as to cast everything into relief nor so high as to wash out details.  Here, at its halfway point, it allows for a soft focus; it is kind to pastels, to the delicate colors of spring.

This would have been a good day to overhear not a marching band but a neighbor idly strumming a guitar on a patio somewhere, picking out bits of a tune, singing a few measures now and then; to catch the gentle murmur of conversation, an occasional laugh in the middle distance.   It didn't happen.  But the finches sang, and the wind was more or less still, and the mourning doves called out their own version of the blues.

The mezzo piano version.