Flagrantly floral

Perhaps no flower is more flagrantly floral than the peony. This cabbage like variation on a rose makes the most of sandy soil and allows ants to eat away its husk to release its ample petals. All it took was two dry days for beds just clear of tulips and daffodils to bloom again, this time with a lasting scent and with no end to the show in sight. These flamboyants that run the gauntlet of pinks and reds pick themselves out of uncoiling covers of ferns and fiddleheads and easily overpower wild garlic and the cheaper perfume of honeysuckle. You'd be forgiven if you thought they were carnations. Such is the abundance of the garden of Summer's eve that it almost makes sense to say prodigal, only slightly less flattering than profligate in the scale of nature running riot, far, far beyond the standards of lushness and bountiful--an embarrassment of riches for the northern woodland born.

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Up along (for Charlotte)

The day is yet young there where you are and I have just been to a screening of You Are Here about the stranded passengers who were fed and found shelter in Gander Newfoundland when American air space was closed in the wake of 9/11 and jumbo jets descended on the town like waves of locusts or bombers returning from sortie and run in stacked formation one atop another as they landed and parked nose to tail as if on some aircraft carrier preparing the way for an assault by land from the start the locals had her skald (for those who know nothing of witches and cauldrons to have her skald means to know your fate and have it in your hands) and sprang to action as seafaring people do used to missing bodies lost livelihoods and death and disasters at sea housing passengers from hither and yon in schools and churches and meeting halls and billeting them in their homes for 24 hours they made sandwiches fried fish and chicken threw toget...

Things always end in the Summer

In the middle of the second major heatwave of the season, the City cut the wildflowers along the footpath. I mean they cut everything 30 inches on either side of the pavement, but since the flowers were my friends, all I saw was that they cut the flowers, even though they actually mowed indiscriminately. And it must have been a chore for the labourer in this heat, so his feet were heavy when he made hay of the prettiest parts of the Summer. But I can't get to that right now; I'm still reeling from the loss of chicory, and the other pinks and yellows and blues whose names I was just beginning to learn. "Program, get your program", I heard the barker call on my way to the bleachers. I turned once and caught his eye, and looked at the program in his hand and back into his eyes--all the while his eyes following mine--but then he looked back to his hand, and again into my eyes and he said "You can't tell the player without a card"! Did it matter that ...

The city mover beat me to the chicory this evening maybe if I had passed by earlier I could have caught a glimpse of them but they will rise Phoenix like from the close cropped pile of grass and weed and present their brash and uneven beauty once again before the need for carpet and trimming loops of magic made by subterranean rug weavers is once again mandated and duly executed by the city crew in the burnt orange cabs of their ride along mowers browning the backs of their hands and letting the heat weather beat their faces to match the cabs and fulfill some unspoken contract between landscaping and maintenance and the gods of Chance Fortune as ever favouring the bold there will be other routs of the mover before the Summer is done and more rain hopefully if I can contain the fear of thunderheads building and more returns of visible biodiversity Nature never surrenders unconditionally but like a lover choosing her battl...

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