The quince rose thorny and sharp beside our front porch steps, snagged all who entered… my father’s temper most. But mother’s patience pruned. She tamed it, told it wait. She knew its blooms, orange neon against winter gray saved our lives.
Each February mother broke a branch to bring indoors. Lifeless sticks warmed in water bloomed in that cheerless room. Poverty lived in cold corners, owned no rugs. The warmest clothes were never quite warm enough and bed quilts had to be high and heavy to hold body heat.
But we lived rich in hope. In that barely warm room, each winter, Mother created spring.
Hello!
Before saying goodbye to the quinces (at least for now), I thought it would be fun to subject a few of the photos to my black background treatment, so picked eleven of each color and did just that. Despite all the little details I had to trace around — including their tiny thorny thorns — many of them came out quite good!
“Italian Renaissance gardens influenced the development of garden design throughout Europe, both in layout and in content. This influence also extended to the proliferation of new species of plants, because the first botanical gardens were in Italy. The purpose of these gardens was to facilitate the study of plants for medicinal purposes. The origins of these gardens are disputed, but they may combine elements of the physic gardens of earlier centuries and the Aztec gardens that the conquistadors had discovered in Mexico….
“The Orto Botanico in Pisa (c. 1543) was planted by Luca Ghini, who taught botany and medicine at the University of Pisa. The garden was planted with medicinal plants gathered by Ghini and his students on field trips in northern Italy. The garden soon developed an international reputation both for the range of its collections and its beauty….
From “Winter Flowering Quince” by Clara Sargent Mainwaring in A Time For Poetry: An Anthology by the North Carolina Poetry Society:
How sudden-brightly primrose pink! sun-touched outside my windowpane sturdy on your thorny stems glistening after winter rain, resting robins fresh from snow, promising that leaves will grow
“I have been making a list of flowering shrubs (those that drop their leaves), one for each month of the year. The list begins with the Chinese witch hazel, and ends with wintersweet. For February I have in mind the flowering quince; though the height of its bloom is often a month later, there are other shrubs for March, and I can think of none so colorful in February.
“The cultivated quinces are forms of two species, Chaenomeles japonica, and C. lagenaria [a synonym for Chaenomeles speciosa]; and of C. x superba, a hybrid between these two. As C. japonica is dwarf, and C. lagenaria is tall there is a great variety in habit. The flowers are white, spectrum red, and tones between red and orange. They bloom between Thanksgiving and Easter….
“C. japonica is a prostrate shrub that spreads very slowly to three or four feet. I used to have it in Raleigh in the shady rock garden, where the small coral flowers appeared freely in March, with a few at almost any time of the year….
“There are any number of good red-flowering quinces in all sizes and shapes…. Many of the red ones are English hybrids.”
Hello!
On the same day I photographed freshly blooming white quince (see White Quince (1 of 2) and White Quince (2 of 2)), I also encountered several newly flowering red quince plants, who posed for the images you see below. As with white quince, these are a mix of Chaenomeles japonica and Chaenomeles speciosa — with some stretching along stone structures and walls, and others growing as compact shrubs. I waited for clouds to move in before taking these photos — something that works well with red flowers, as red in bright sunlight can be over-saturated, leading to a loss of detail.
My previous post White Quince (2 of 2) includes an excerpt from the book Japanese Gardens by Wendy B. Murphy — where the author mentions that the quince flowers appear before the plant’s leaves. That subtle characteristic is also reflected in the poem at the top of this post, where the poet observes that the flowering quince is “promising that leaves will grow.” How cool is that!
