Bookish Gardener

Amo amas amelanchier

Spring's imperative: to visit all the amelanchiers at the Arboretum when they're in bloom once a year. Their finery is on display for only a short time, and this week is that week. Amelanchier is a delicious-to-say botanical name; Wiki-know-it-all puts paid to the urban legend (well, a legend, probably not urban) that its common name of "serviceberry" comes from its bloomtime coinciding with the time when the frozen ground has thawed sufficiently to allow digging of burial plots. Serviceberry, shadbush, Juneberry: they're all lovely. The delicate white blossoms drape like Chantilly lace over deeply colored, athletically sinewed limbs and branches. Even those with abstractly improvised branching pose artfully (although I just saw one in a commercial landscape hedge-trimmed into a lozenge; don't do them like that). With some, the white raiment shines bright against the emerging lime green foliage; with others, the flowers and leaves merge into a sepia haze that somehow tints their surroundings too, and transports you, wibbly-wobbly, to a past time not your own. Glimpse them while you can; it won't be long until the amelanchiers change into their street clothes and recede into the crowd.

Promenade in green

"53º Cloudy." It's a falling mist that only aspires to rain. The garden is a quiet monochrome of green after the weekend's first fresh lawn mow and a lively thunder-and-lightning show last night. It's the stage of the season when everything is up but the blooms are accents only to the expanse of green foliage, the promenade in green.

Lapin farci aux Tommies

Love: Bugs Bunny, Watership Down. Hate: Cottontail rabbits, not least the one that sat itself down, figuratively tucked in its fine dining napkin under its chin, and methodically and leisurely chomped through the Crocus tommasinianus that were just beginning to show their promise. (Nope, Tommies are not rabbit-resistant.)

The pelt of this rascal might be regarded Cruella DeVillishly, with its splotch of ginger and streaks of black and cloud-cover gray. And certain other ideas might come to mind as one leafs through Joe Beef's Surviving the Apocalypse or Fergus Henderson's The Complete Nose to Tail. Yes, fine sir, I've got a recipe for rabbit leg confit with your name on it.

"pom-pomming bushes / all along the beach town streets."

These lines are from the poem "High Dangerous," by Catherine Pierce, yesterday's gift from the Academy of American Poets' "Poem-a-Day" series. This poem is lovely and poignant—it captures the once-and-future sensation of watching your children and experiencing, in that moment, the prospective sensation of reminiscence, and loss, that you know will fill your memories after they've grown up and moved on.

I'm too impatient to endure "reading" books by means of audiobook, but poetry must be read aloud. Hearing the poet read this poem is a bonus-upon-bonus—

—since it's the best way to appreciate the beautiful pun that this poem is built around. And not just any pun, but one about my botanical-name-pronunciation bête noire, the hydrangea. "Dran" or "Drain"? Dictionaries differ. The garden club ladies in The Manchurian Candidate "drain." I was stuck in the "Dran" camp, muttering "how strange to say 'hy-drange...'"—oh. Got it. (One small case of hypercorrection cured.)

These pom-poms...I'm thinking 'Annabelle,' yes?

Happy first day of (metereological) spring!

{(Blows dust off.) Do I still know how to work this thing?}

Happy spring, one and all. It's 16°F at the moment, and it won't get above freezing today, and there's a single-digit high and a below-zero low in the forecast for three days from now, but...

I love the light this time of the year. In the hour or so before sunset, it quiets everything down and slowly turns the seasonal affect dial toward..."hope."

Spring joy, or as Clifford Brown and Max Roach would play: