Squill

Day 219: English Wood Hyacinth carries its flowers along one side of the stem, as opposed to Spanish Wood Hyacinth which has flowers arranged all around the stem. Both are easily confused with good old Scilla, shown here. I use the word "good" with a great deal of reservation. Despite its beautiful blue hue and dainty flowers, this bulb (also known as Squill) can be a nuisance in the garden. It is almost impossible to eradicate once established, and I speak as the Voice of Experience. I've been working on getting them out of my north-side flower bed for 35 years, and this year's showing proves that I'm not even close to winning the war. They don't want to grow where I want to put them under Big Doug, preferring instead to try to crowd out my now sparse lily-of-the-valley, and even threatening the daffodils. They come up between two pieces of concrete in the Barren Wasteland. They volunteer along the edge of my narrow woods. But would they grow beneath Big Doug? Not a chance. It's not the acidic soil. Where they border the wooded strip is equally acidic. They just don't want to cooperate. I think the time has come to simply enjoy the blues.

Drip Catchers

Day 197: I've dug and scratched and shovelled and scraped and sifted, and have thrown dozens upon dozens of Bluebell bulbs out of my garden and into the woods. Still the little buggers come back, year after year, worse than Lily-of-the-Valley (which, incidentally, I love). "Scilla," my mother called them, a relic of their former Latin appellation. Hyacinthoides non-scripta is what they go by these days: Common Bluebell, Hyacinth Bluebell, and for my nickel, they should be on the invasive species hit list. They'll crowd anything else out of a garden.

But then the other side of my brain kicks in, the non-scientific, artistic side, and I find myself thinking, "Yeah, but they're pretty," so the bulbs I pull get tossed onto the growing mound of turves at the margin of my woods. I'm building a berm by default, making a clearer boundary between forest and yard. "Naturalize your little heads off," I tell them as I pitch them onto the pile, and naturalize they do, but some of their kin will crop up in the flower beds again next year, more guests I wish I could send out to a motel. Frustrated, I dig them out again. "Go be pretty somewhere else!"

Then comes a moment when the elegance of their blossoms enchants me, recurved petals (tepals, if the truth be told) holding in precarious tension miniature gazing globes in which my garden is reflected. My demeanor softens under their subtle coercion and I permit them to stay, if in close preserves. My heart is not so hard that it cannot be moved by a simple flower waving its colors in the breeze.