The Garden of the Seasons: The Garden Springs to Life in May

 

The Clematis vine climbs up our front porch. It blooms from around the third week of May through the month of June. We live Quincy, a small city that borders Boston, Mass.

Here's a poem inspired by our Clematis plant:

ClematisLooking Down at Us*

 

Like fallen stars

but oversized

great violet wheels descending on tame, unwary

    villages below

those little folk of summer

 

Wagging fat limbs, like octopi

bred on a diet of purple sun

Creatures from a universe of stronger light

     and the appetite of clouds

 

their slow motion tumble

the stopwatch of spring

 

*It was published by Turtle Island quarterly, back in February.

Blue Forget-Me-Not blooms under a Weeping Cherry tree. The white-blooming groundcover is Sweet Woodruff.

 

 

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award, and hHe was named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award. A book of linked short stories, titled "House Stories," has been accepted for publication by Adelaide Press.

Bleeding Heart blooms in April.

 

The tree-form of Peony, also known as the Chinese Peony, blooms early in May. Unlike the more common Peony, the stems are wood and do not wilt or die back in winter. And its blossoms are large.

I wrote this back in 2013:

With blossoms big as your hand, the “tree peony” was voted the “unofficial national flower” of China following a nationwide vote in the nineties. In Chinese culture, red is the color of good luck.

            The tree peony grows taller and has more of a classic branching-out tree shape than the more common peony shrub. It has a woody trunk and branches like a tree, and you don’t trim the woody parts back

            And it seems to bloom earlier. I was surprised the first time it bloomed early in May. Last year it bloomed in April. This year, a cooler, slower spring, the flowers first showed on May 11.

            It’s hard not to stare at the blossoms if you’re nearby. They’re the neon signs in the Times Square of springtime’s Nature City.  

Eight years later, I'm still amazed by the blossoms every year.

The flowers pictured, from above, are an Icelandic Poppy (orange); a Korean lilac, very pale flowers, looking white in this photo; roses blooming over a Rhododendron; and Siberian Iris, that begin opening in late May.