Spring Flower Musings
Written by Oona Sellew
I had my first real farmer’s dream this month. As I walked through beds of tulips, I saw hardly any worth picking. Some were showing just the right amount of color, indicating that they were ready for harvesting, but were just two inches tall. Others were a gorgeous thirteen inches in height, without a flower head to be seen, just dramatic drooping greenery. I made my way through the beds to grab the few that were standing a foot tall with a tinted flower head. As I picked these absolutely ideal tulips, they each in turn opened their frilled faces to me, revealing staggering colors, and promptly shed every last petal, leaving me with a piteous handful of wilting and flowerless stems.
Needless to say, I’ve been worrying about all of our little bulbs. On planting day last fall, I worried that all three thousand of them would freeze to death over the long winter. As the winter continued to prove itself to be frustratingly mild, I worried that they’d all rot under the heavy down comforters of leaves and wood chips I’d so lovingly and anxiously piled on top of them to keep them warm.
As it turns out, life wants to, and somehow always does, find a way. Even if we had buried all of these bulbs a mere inch under ground … even if we had opted for not two layers of mulch, but one… even if the winter had been more bitter cold and harsh… these little balls of energy would have burst forth this spring in all their glory the way they have every spring for longer than any of us can remember.
In the springtimes thus far in my life, my only relationship to the nodding narcissus, my only obligation to them, was to drive more slowly to take in their sunny clusters along the roadside. Spring for me has always come at its own pace, at just the right time. For all I cared, the growing beings could keep their secrets; the how, and the why, and the when of all of their coming-forth was their own business and I’d, obligingly, just admire.
This year, the farmer’s obligation has asked that I pay a little more attention to the how and the why and the when of it all. The “why” I am convinced, will remain forever a mystery. That a seed or bulb or corm, under a certain set of conditions can put down roots and then unfurl into a photo-synthesizing, breathing being is beyond me. But I’ve scratched the surface of the how and when. I’ve learned, for example, that when put deep underground and piled another 3 inches high with leaves and wood chips, daffodils will emerge much more slowly than their unburdened counterparts. This, coupled with the fact that first-year bulbs do not grow with the same vigor as previously-naturalized bulbs, can account for the delay in flower production in our fields. The depth of a bulb can also account for the length of the stems that emerge from it. I was advised by our dear friend Tu that the short-stemmed flowers I so nightmarishly discovered in my dream (and in fact appeared in reality!) could simply be dug out a bit from the soil and mulch, to reveal a good two or three more inches of plant.
These past two weeks, I’ve nervously checked in on each of the flowers, mentally charted daylight hours, tracked daytime and nighttime temperatures, and weighed fahrenheit degrees against the sizes of the emerging buds, waiting for a gut instinct to tell me “Now! Cut them now!” When the time comes, I’ll shuttle the little emerging gems into refrigerated darkness, pausing their growth for just a touch longer so that we may continue to savor their fleeting sweetness. Despite all the worrying, the trying to plan and control, every time I see a flower in bloom, I am reminded of the true obligation: to just admire.
