Garden Colour

Day 226: Around Memorial Day, my flower beds are almost at their best. While other plants are yet to come, the blood-red peonies my father loved are in abundant bloom, as yet unspoiled by rain. The fence line sports a bold showing of Siberian iris, and the Barren Wasteland hosts a broad orange splash of Oriental poppies with a dot of blue cornflowers off to one side. The alliums are new this year, and so far, only the dark purple ones have opened, but their wands stand two to three feet high in the front bed, each capped with a three-inch diameter knob of flowers like chives on steroids. Bright colours, the brighter the better, have always appealed to me. Pastels have their place, but I prefer flamboyancy in my garden.

Peony In Bud

Day 202: It's the time of year when everybody posts pictures of peony buds, so far be it from me to miss the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. My peonies came with the house, one of very few ornamentals to be found in the overgrown flower beds. The roots were buried so deeply that they never would have bloomed. In fact, I only found them while digging out weeds. Once lifted to the proper planting depth (partially exposed to sunlight), they rewarded me with the blood-red blossoms which had been my father's favourites. Over the years, I shifted them from one location to another until they found a final home beneath the east living room window where I can admire them while watching the birds at the feeders. Even after the flowers have shed their petals, the foliage remains lush until autumn.

Remembering My Father

Day 228: My father is a faint memory. I do not recall his voice, although his words sometimes come to mind. I do not remember his touch, only that he held me on his lap. My recollections of him are visual: at the saw in his wood shop, turning compost at the foot of the garden, driving through the wooden gate as I rode it closed behind the black Ford he always drove. But I cannot see him in my mind, digging in the flower beds among the peonies he so loved, although I know he tended them with care. They were his favourites, those blood-red blossoms, short-lived as was he. At 39 years of age, he passed from this world as a lingering victim of war, and on the following Memorial Day, my mother blanketed his grave with one bright bloom for each year of his life. Peonies, touching the world so briefly and with such beauty, and gone in the blink of an eye.

No Foolin'!

Day 169: It is not April Fools' Day. It is March 31, and this is no prank. My peonies are in bud, a full month or more ahead of their normal blooming period. I don't think I've ever seen them so early. On the heels of this comes a news report that Antarctica has reported a record-breaking temperature of 63.5 degrees yesterday. You'd have to be a pretty big fool to turn a blind eye to the significance of these portents, but there are still those who deny the growing mountain of evidence that our climate is warming. However, some will cite the East Coast's hard winter as a contradiction. It is not. In fact, it is a symptom. As the temperatures rise, so does atmospheric moisture, and this leads to heavier snowfalls when the right conditions are met. It seems odd to say that heavy snows and global warming go hand in hand, but those are the facts, no foolin'.

His Favourite Flower

 Day 236: They were his favourite flower, blood-red peonies, and while he was a man who worked the soil and brought forth fine crops of corn, beans and squash, his assistance in my mother's flower beds was notoriously disastrous; to wit the painstaking removal of all her poppies in the belief that they were a type of thistle. Peony roots, however, were something he recognized, and he contributed to their well-being with generous applications of the hand-turned compost he brought up from the bottom of the field. It is peonies, not poppies, that I associate with men in uniformed service and veterans, and peonies which bring the tears to my eyes in empathy for the families which have been shattered by death in the name of war.

My father died not in battle during the Second World War, but some years later of an insidious disease contracted as a result of unimaginable deprivations suffered during almost four years in an internment camp. For as long as we lived within driving distance of the cemetery where he is buried, it was my mother's custom to blanket his grave on Memorial Day with 39 of the peonies he so loved: one for each year of his brief span of life.