Garden of the Seasons: Every Spring the World Begins Again

 

An afternoon in the first day of May

Shapes and color tones beginning to define themselves

In the third week of April, the weeping cherry tree blossoms. Most of the garden in the backyard of our house in a small Massachusetts city is still waking up, though the daffodils are in bloom.

A bird or two, always a purple finch, arrives at exactly this moment to drink the nectar, a tiny drop or two, from the blossoms. To do this the bird pulls the blossom off the branch with its beak and gives it a quick toss into the air. Sometimes this causes the blossoms to fall like snow and gather beneath the tree. Fearing to see the tree denuded while still in blossom, I run outdoors and scare them away. Within a few minutes they're back.  

Violets 

are blue,

and purple,

and sometimes white with fluted blue centers.

I find the combination exquisite.

These wild violets are among those I transplanted from our back garden where they emerge free for the taking every spring. Up before any of the large plants can block the sun or hog the ground, the plants flourish here along a low brick edging and in the sidewalk strip in front of our house where the only early season competition is the daffodils. 

The low groundcover with blue flowers is Vinca Minor. It grows all over our gardens. We transplanted it from our previous home, and from some wooded sites in Berkshire County. The flowers are darker, more purple than they appear in this photo. Vinca spreads quickly, and found its way over to this sideyard below the rhododendrons (the smaller one is in flower), a few years back. It's perfectly at home there now. 

Another late April moment from the back garden. The tall plant, not yet in flower here, is a a tree-form peony, from China. Its stems are woody and remain firm through the winters like tree trunks. Its flowers are bright red, and large. They bloom in mid-May (I'll post them next time). Violets and daffodils are the only blooms visible here in spring's first month, but the seasonal contours are forming on the ground.  

The Garden of Verse: These Poems Are Blooming in May

Outdoor days are back. Studies show that people feel better if they spend just twenty minutes a day outdoors. I know I feel good after spending time with plants.

“Recipe for a Curbside Strip” is an account of my efforts to keep a flower garden growing in a city by replanting the ground in front of our house after the city rebuilt our street and sidewalk. 

Here's an excerpt:

Recipe for a Curbside Strip

 

Begin again in Thanksgiving cold,

planting scores of daffodil starters,

those fat spuds of sunny potential,

in the city's gift of much-pebbled soil

Wait five months for the bloom,

add wild violets transferred by hand from

the fertile, weed-addicting earth of the perennial patches

out back,

plus other nameless wildthings, weeds

and a prominent invasive left to its own greedy device

Chip in some new Covid-priced annuals

(everything pretty much double this year)

Then out back again to hunt up more ground-hugging

violets to fill 

a few shyly embarrassed bare spots

like children with too much flesh

for last year's clothing

...

 The next two poems are responses to Covid Time.

An excerpt from:

Of Course the Poet Wears a Mask

 

Everybody wears a mask

the fender polisher wears a mask

the metallurgist

the surgeon in his lair

     to guard against the spatter

The actor with his shrewd demeanor

to take us into his confidence...

 

Who am I today?

the player asks

the politician with his broken staff

the weeping child

the disappointed lover

the confident despoiler

the rigger

the triggerman

...

 

And, finally from:

Accidental Collaborators

 

She turned to me, a look of distant rainbows

in her eyes

Kiss me, I said, you fool

...

 

To read the poems in their entirety, go to

 http://verse-virtual.org/2021/May/knox-robert-2021-may.html