8/25/2023 0 Comments Image link slugline indesignThe hard freeze of April 14 lingers like a familiar spirit haunting the edges of memory. Against all good sense I conjure the troubling spirit almost every time I walk through the gardens.įrom my white ash rocking chair on the sandstone floor of Doghenge, the sun high in the mellow sky, I see the sparse crop of tulip poplar flowers, many emerging as damaged specimens by way of the freeze five weeks past. They're beautiful nonetheless, the hardy survivors. A poplar blossom is one of Nature's grandest gifts, a yellow and orange six-petalled cup holding about four dozen wavy, slender, and succulent stigmas which are arrayed around a conical fruit which is sprinkled with a half-hundred tiny brown specks. The orange rises from the bottom of the cup like flames rising from the pit of an alchemist's furnace. I thought the specks might be seeds, but the research proves inconclusive and the furnaces have sat cold and inert for two centuries now. Out front in the arboretum, the twin bridal wreath spirea spread full but blossomless, their flowers having been slain in the bud by the freeze. The lilacs, tall and green, could muster but a smattering of fragrant blossoms when their time came a few weeks back. The nearby golden raintree, once a vigorous sapling, now joins the gloomy throng of the "standing dead," a woodsman's term as rude as it is appropriate. The young pampas grasses I planted last autumn refuse to emerge, and though I'll wait another week or two, I figure they succumbed to the bitter winter. The iris clan presented a wondrous parade of elegant, pungent blooms all through May, and though the crop has passed its peak, a dozen or two of these sensuous creatures grace the gardens at this precious moment. ![]() Their vertical forms, nodding from the downward pull of full-bodied blossoms, wear shades of pale violet and cream, pink and amber, rusty red and lemony yellow, turquoise and white - with a few more set to bloom before the season's end. ![]() ![]() No wonder to me no mystery at all why Georgia O' fell for them in her modernist palace behind the veil.Īn iris in full flower with emerging buds | at 3 Dog Acres The cascading petals of the peony flowers - white, pink, red - burst forth last week and now whisper a promise to show 'till the end of May.
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