From “Snowflakes and Snowdrops: Leucojum” in The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens by Elizabeth Lawrence:
“L. vernum is called St. Agnes’ flower in honor of the patron saint of young virgins. The modest, chaste, and solitary bells are wonderfully fragrant, but the fragrance is not of violets. It is of vanilla and of something else, something that eludes analysis….
“The buds swell when they are ready to open, but the lime-green tips of the petals remain tightly twisted into a point until they suddenly flare apart. The scapes continue to stretch up after the flowers open, and so, in a single clump, the nodding bells are hung on stems of varying heights, from one to six or more inches. The thin, polished leaves come with the flowers but develop more slowly. They are curved in a way that repeats the hooked flower pedicel in a delightful and characteristic rhythm.”
From “Harbingers of Spring” in When You Seek Me: Poems by Paula Marie Breiter:
Forerunners humble
Shy teardrops, tiny, demure
Snowbells welcome spring
From “Harbingers of Spring” in When You Seek Me: Poems by Paula Marie Breiter:
Invite me to stoop low
And examine
The poignant remnant of
fragile winter beauty
Bowing humbly graceful
before the dawn
A cluster of snowbells
Nestled amid brown bare
surroundings
Hello!
This is the third of three posts with photographs of Spring Snowflakes, Leucojum vernum, that I took at Oakland Cemetery in the middle of February. The first post is Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (1 of 3) and the second post is Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (2 of 3).
Spring Snowflakes (sometimes called Snowbells, as in the two poems above) happily occupy two locations at Oakland. The first location is just inside the main entrance to the property, where they are among the earliest flowering plants visitors will discover as they enter in February or March. At this location, the Snowflakes thrive at the base of some shrubs and smaller trees, where they’ll catch morning sun then get to bask in shade for the rest of the day. The population here has expanded over the years I’ve been photographing them, from a handful of sparsely arranged clumps to a crowd of plants filling spaces around the adjacent tree trunks, memorial stones, and architectural elements. As the season proceeds, the Snowflake buds will disappear but their leaves remain until well into the summer — creating a rich green and grassy palette that complements the flowering plants that bloom after them and around them: azaleas, irises, hydrangeas, lilies, daylilies, and occasional marigolds, among others, providing a broad range of textures and colors that greet returning visitors and introduce the variety of plants they’ll encounter further into the property.
The second location isn’t far from the first, but its composition is quite different. Imagine a large rectangle, where the right side of the rectangle is adjacent to the main entrance walkway I just described. The first section of the rectangle you encounter extends along a sidewalk — a sidewalk somewhat hidden by shrubs on both sides — and into the property at your left. If you keep walking, you’ll encounter stretches of Spring Snowflakes just inside the rectangle — a field that’s mostly open except for those plants landscapers have placed along its borders, with its center left empty and used as a staging area for events, or, at other times, as a picnic area by visitors. The Snowflakes appear here in separate clusters of three or four plants each, with spaces between them, extending across a span of about twenty feet. Like the Snowflakes in the first location, the number of plants has grown substantially over the years, and in the spring your eye is drawn to the many white bell-shaped flowers bobbing in the slightest breeze.
This field only gets filtered sun at its edges, because it’s covered by a leaf canopy from some of Oakland’s oldest oaks and maples, whose age is evident from the enormous size of their trunks. Flowering plants appear along the other borders of the field throughout March and April: daffodils first, followed by tulips, followed by bluebells and azaleas surrounding the trunks of its trees. The combination of a tree canopy, border plants only, and wide open center section gives the whole space a distinctive form, one that feels like you’ve entered a separate outdoor room as you walk from one side to the other — a physical experience similar to walking through a forest then suddenly encountering a clearing, where the visual characteristics of the transition are almost jarring in their differences.
The sense that you’ve entered a separate room that feels like a natural cathedral is not just compelling visually. Though the tree canopy, border plants, and open space are an obvious visual attraction, the auditory experience is the real showstopper. The entire property is surrounded by Oakland’s original brick walls (which are six to eight feet tall), which dampen sound from the city streets around it. When you first enter the property, though, that’s not immediately apparent, because the entrance is still close to the streets and there are always people milling about. But by the time you pass to this canopied section housing our Spring Snowflakes, all of that sound is significantly reduced as if someone turned the volume down, and it remains reduced as you proceed from there deeper into the property. It’s almost as if the landscape designers created not only a visual transition, but an auditory one where you move from noises of the surrounding streets until you are bathed in silence and completely detached from the outside world’s noise. This soundlessness repeats itself no matter how often you visit the property, sort of like you enter an airlock or don sound-cancelling headphones while walking from the entrance to the canopied area. And the ground in this area is frequently refreshed with new pine straw, which, intentionally or not, dampens sound further: even your feet barely make a noise as you traverse the area.
This is of course not something that can be captured with photographs (though I’m still gonna try!), but is still integral to the design of a garden cemetery like Oakland. Visual and memorial characteristics are combined with simulations of the natural world where we can experience a quiet departure from the sensory racket of urban life outside its walls.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
