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Blooming Bluebells

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From “Jottings in the Churchyard at Ragaz” in Poems 1906-1926 by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman:

Think of brightness through the foliage streaming
down into the shade where breezes blow…:
how in that strange light’s ethereal gleaming,
scarcely swung, will stand some single-seeming,
tall-grown bluebell, far below….

From “Derbyshire Bluebells” in Selected Poems by Sacheverell Sitwell:

The wood is one blue flame of love,
It trembles with the thrush and dove;
Who is this honey beacon for,
That burns this once, then never more?
Whose lutes hide in the young green leaves?
Who sorrows here when no one grieves?

The misty spaces in the boughs,
No shouts will fill, no stone will rouse
If at those panes we beat in vain
Why hope to quench that fire with rain?
Why beat the bluebells down to find
How fire and honey are combined?

There is no space for foot to tread
Unless you bruise the flower head,
No corner where you cannot hear
The dove’s long croon, the thrush sing near,
Like bells out of the trees’ tall spires
These songs above the bluebell fires….

From “English Bluebells” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“Going to visit the bluebells has been a tradition for many [British] families for more than a century, mainly in their stronghold of southeastern England. Starting just as spring is turning into summer, the flowers can turn woodlands into lakes of blue that in some cases seem to reach as far as the density of tree growth allows us to see….

“Historical records of bluebells are relatively few and far between, and the plant was known to our ancestors more as a source of starch for stiffening the ruffs worn by the wealthy of Elizabethan England than as something to admire. It was not until the nineteenth century that writers took much notice of it, and gardeners too. Small patches of bluebells are rather unimpressive, and it is no surprise that the larger, and paler, Spanish bluebell, H. hispanica, makes a better garden plant. Finally, it is worth noting that the common name is an English designation. For the Scots the bluebell is Campanula rotundifolia; for the Americans it is Mertensia virginica; and Nigerians and New Zealanders have their own, totally unrelated, ‘bluebells’ too.”

Hello!

Below is a small collection of bluebell photographs, taken at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens last month. While not as impressive a display as those of the English woodlands that Noel Kingsbury describes above, they were still quite adorable growing in sandy soil at the base of an ancient oak tree near the garden entrance, with a few peeking through the seat of an old wrought iron bench nearby.

Thanks for taking a look!

Cherry Blossoms and Dogwood Blooms

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From “Petals from Heaven” by Kobayashi Issa in The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern:

petals from heaven
         flurrying down it seems
oh cherry trees!

From “On Windless Days” by Miura Chora in The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern:

on windless days
         scattering that much more…
cherry blossoms

From “Spring Snow” in The Windbreak Pine: New and Collected Haiku 1985-2015 by Wally Swist:

spring snow —
                  an unopened bud at the end
of each branch of the dogwood

From “Down to Dark Leaf-Mold” by O. Southard in A Haiku Path by The Haiku Society of America:

Down to dark leaf-mold
         the falling dogwood-petal
                  carries its moonlight

Hello!

Here we have some photographs of cherry blossoms and dogwood blooms, taken at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens last month. Funny that the phrase “cherry blossoms and dogwood blooms” sounds better than “cherry blooms and dogwood blossoms” — though I have no idea why. Words are just amusing like that, I guess.

Both kinds of trees were blooming bounteously — the volume of blossoms was actually quite stunning. I would’ve liked to have taken even more cherry blossom photos — but the trees had so carefully scattered spent flowers on all the surrounding sidewalks (as in the first four photos below), I kept my distance and did some zooming closeups instead. Somehow it just seemed wrong to trample on that mass of scentually intoxicating (buzzzzz!) pink petals. I also thought I might get stuck in a blossom-drift; you know, I’m quite short and they’re piled pretty high. (This may or may not be true.)

Thanks for taking a look!

Azalea Blooms Aplenty

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From “Azaleas and Rhododendrons” in Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“Most of us think [azaleas and rhododendrons] are different plants. Catalogues list them separately, and gardening journalists clearly distinguish between them, with reason. Rhododendrons are evergreen with large, leathery leaves; azaleas are mostly deciduous and have finer foliage. Rhododendrons like shade, azaleas don’t. Even the pests and diseases that attack them aren’t the same. Such distinctions don’t impress botanists — they count stamens. Azaleas were once thought to have five, rhododendrons ten or more. When this criterion was found not to be invariable, azaleas were summarily moved into the genus rhododendron….

“Classification aside, no gardener is going to confuse the somehow eminently Victorian rhododendron with shiny leaves that roll up like cigars when the cold strikes them and big, globular flowers, with the airier, more fragile-looking azaleas that seem to belong on a Japanese screen. Even the color ranges are different, indeed opposed, as Gertrude Jekyll long ago pointed out…. Rhododendrons are at the blue end of the red spectrum — mauve, purple, blush pink — azaleas at the yellow: peach and copper, hot reds and oranges….

“America has beautiful native varieties of both: R. catawbiense that lights up the forest primeval in the Great Smokies, the scented azaleas called arborescens and viscosum, and many more. But the most spectacular come from China and Japan. They are magnificent shrubs in their way….”

From “Japanese Azalea in the Tropics” in Out of Darkness Blossoming: Poems by Edward A. Watson:

Beneath the crumbling verandah
a single azalea bloomed.
Against what and for whom
we concluded nothing,
for in the fifteenth year
and after the fifteenth flower,
their presence mystified us.
And as I tended the seasonal rhythms
of that underworld, I knew, finally,
that bees indeed were a kind of myth
for the one bloom strutted its promiscuity
in the clear presence of toads.

From “Cardinals Mate for Life” in Touching Shadows: Poems by Bonny Barry Sanders:

While I am still locked in the tender cage
of your arms and legs, I hear the cardinal call from the oak
beside the deck. I go out with my gourmet blend:
black oil sunflower, raw peanuts, thistle and safflower.
I rattle the seed container and echo
his raspy chipping. I pitch him the same slur
of notes every day. You might think it has to do
with recognition, but it’s more

than that. Back and forth he and I toss
our greeting like a game of catch.
With each response, he comes closer
until he is in a locust tree by the front door.
I hear the clicking lisp of his mate
ahead of him in the azalea bush next to me.
He is guarding her from above.
He will watch until I go in….

Hello!

I don’t usually photograph azaleas, mainly because in the spring and early summer they’re So Everywhere around Atlanta that I don’t really notice them — the very definition of ubiquitous, a word I like a lot but hardly ever get a chance to use. Then a few weeks ago I came across some azaleas with blooms in very unusual orange or salmon shades that I’d never seen before — which you can see in large formation in the first three photographs below.

At first I thought it was a trick of the morning light — morning light is like that sometimes! — or a color variation cause by reflected white from the building behind them. But those in the foreground of the photo are more salmony orange-pink than those in the background (which are the more common dark pink or red azalea color), and the color change occurs right in the middle of the cluster of shrubs — suggesting that two different varieties were originally planted here and each one spread laterally.

The next nine photos show the color transitions I found on the foreground plants. The unopened buds are mostly orange; the partially opened flowers are a mix of orange and pink; and by the time they’re fully opened, the pink and orange blend together into a salmon color.

After I spent some time photographing these (which are located just outside one of Oakland Cemetery’s notable structures, the 1899-built Bell Tower), a frequency illusion kicked in and I started noticing all the other azaleas I usually ignored. While none of the others exhibited the same unique color scheme, they were all quite striking on their own, showing off shades of pink, purple, red, and white. I took the remaining series of wide-angle photos in several locations where their big bloom-spans created a nice contrast with the fresh greens of various shrubs, as well as the reds of Japanese Maples and flowering Dogwood trees. Perhaps you can also get a sense from photos like these how pleasant a strolling-place Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens can be.

Thanks for taking a look!

Apricot Blooms and a Ladybug

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From The Plant Hunters by Alice M. Coats:

“In 1891-3, James Harry Veitch (1868-1907), elder son of the John Gould Veitch who had died [of tuberculosis] so tragically young, made a world tour, starting in November with Ceylon and India. The first part consisted of a stately progress from one botanic or public garden to another, each of which he mercilessly describes down to the very bandstand; he does not seem to have taken one wild flower in his hand for the first six months of his travels…. After visiting Java and Singapore, he sailed in March 1892 from Hong Kong to Yokohama. In Japan he became much more enterprising and emancipated, and had his first experience of collecting in the wild.

“After looking about him in Yokohama and visiting some local gardens, James Veitch went to Tokio, and was somewhat dismayed by the quantity and extent of the local nurseries, more numerous even than those of Flanders or Holland. The cherries were in bloom, and he was greatly impressed by them, especially the famous mile of trees at Mukojima; though he makes the surprising statement that ‘the species is known scientifically as Prunus mume; it is really an Apricot’….”

From “Little Rain” by Elizabeth Madox Roberts in Time for Poetry, compiled by May Hill Arbuthnot:

When I was making myself a game
Up in the garden, a little rain came.

It fell down quick in a sort of rush,
And I crawled back under the snowball bush.

I could hear the big drops hit the ground
And see little puddles of dust fly round.

A chicken came till the rain was gone;
He had just a very few feathers on.

He shivered a little under his skin,
And then he shut his eyeballs in.

Even after the rain had begun to hush
It kept on raining up in the bush.

One big flat drop came sliding down,
And a ladybug that was red and brown

Was up on a little stem waiting there
And I got some rain in my hair.

Hello!

The photos below are blossoms from a tree I believe is an apricot tree, though I’ve never been completely sure of my identification. It’s definitely a member of the genus Prunus, which includes a variety of spring-blossoming shrubs and trees whose undifferentiated common names — variations of cherry, plum, apricot, almond, and peach, often modified by “Japanese” or “Chinese” — create a lot of confusion in the plant identification world. Until I learn otherwise, I’m going to stick with calling these flowers apricot tree blossoms — mainly because this tree is unique among many of the blooming fruit trees I find at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, and I can typically identify cherry, plum, and peach blossoms on other similar trees.

It’s only partly apparent from my photographs, but the tree’s branches — unlike typical upright flowering fruit trees or shrubs — hang almost like vines from a central trunk structure that’s about fifteen feet high. It may have been cultivated to grow this way — shaped over the years to be reminiscent of some bonsai — and its general “design” reminds me of a fleur-de-lis waterfall or fountain or a sparse version of a weeping willow. The individual branches are thin and pliable, waving to match the wind flow of even the slightest breeze. And, as it happens, there are variations of apricot and cherry trees called weeping apricots or weeping cherry trees whose appearance is very similar.

The flower clusters at this stage were quite small, and I didn’t realize at first that I had a ladybug posing in some of the photos. The first five shots below show the ladybug’s travels along one of the blossoms, just before I got a little too close and it opened its wings and twizzled away.

Thanks for taking a look!

Crabapple Trees, a Bit of History, and Two Poems

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From “The Cincinnatus of the West: George Washington’s American Garden at Mount Vernon” in Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf:

“By the summer of 1776, Manhattan had been transformed into an armed camp. American soldiers drilled in the wide tree-lined streets and troops took over the elegant brick mansions normally occupied by the New York elite. Huge wooden barricades were erected where fashionable women had promenaded only weeks earlier, and forts were built around the tiny hamlet of Brooklyn to defend the city. New York faced 32,000 British troops — more than one and a half times the city’s entire peacetime population and the largest enemy fleet ever to reach American shores….

“[As] the British troops were preparing their ferocious onslaught, Washington brushed aside his generals and his military maps, sat in the flicker of candlelight with his quill and wrote a long letter to his estate manager and cousin Lund Washington at Mount Vernon, his plantation in Virginia. As the city braced itself, Washington pondered the voluptuous blossom of rhododendron, the sculptural flowers of mountain laurel and the perfect pink of crab apple. These ‘clever kind[s] of Trees (especially flowering ones),’ he instructed, should be planted in two groves by either side of his house….”

From “The Crabapple in Flower” in Zero Meridian: Poems by Deborah Warren:

The crabapple tore through the house one week in April,
boughs in armloads — room after room — in vases,
jars from the cupboards, jugs from the cellar, urns….

The long sprays dazzled us,
but their beauty pierced us, too, with a desire
to know them, to possess them, in some way
five pale senses could never satisfy.

From “Crabapple Blossoms” in Poems of Inspiration and Courage by Grace Noll Crowell:

This morning as I climbed a golden hill
I came upon a slim crabapple tree:
A pink-white cloud of glory… I stood still —
For like a runner, breath was gone from me….

Hello!

The crabapple tree I photographed for this post is located just inside the main entrance gate to Oakland Cemetery, in a section called “The Original Six Acres” — because it was just that, the original six-acre plot that established the cemetery in 1849, a size it remained at until 1867 when it was expanded to 48 acres.

Imagine my surprise to discover that despite having visited the cemetery countless times over the past few years, I had no photographs of the gate itself. But you can see one at Oakland Cemetery’s history page, scrolling down to “1896” when the gate was constructed. There’s also a fun photograph of the gate from the HBO series Watchmen — where it was featured in a flyover for a funeral scene. You can see that photograph at the Oakland in Film page. Scroll down to “Watchmen 2019” — where the iconic gate is shown, with the name of the cemetery changed to “Tartarus Acres” for the series. I remember watching that series, not knowing that it was partially filmed in Atlanta — but instantly knew it was when I saw the gate in this scene.

Now picture yourself walking through the gate and immediately looking to your right in early March of any year — and there you will find this crabapple tree, sporting some of the first seasonal color among the garden’s bushes and trees.

I wonder if it’s been growing there since 1849….

Thanks for taking a look!