The Pink Rain

This is one of my favorite times of the year. I call it the season of the Pink Rain, when the cherry petals drop and carpet the sidewalks.





The picture on the left was taken on April 28, when the sidewalks were peppered with petals like confetti.



The next two photos were taken on May 7 when the dusting of petals had become a carpet, filling the gutters with pink rain.




These last two photos were taken on May 14 and May 16 and show the heaps of petals covering parked cars and covering the surface of a decorative pool in front of an apartment building. The pink rain is almost over, alas!

A Trip to the Iris Farm in my New Car

On Mother's Day, I made a quick trip down to Schreiners Iris Farm just outside of Salem, Oregon. It's a pilgrimage I plan every year but seldom execute. This year the leisurely trip I planned ended up crunched into one grueling day of driving. But it was all so much more pleasant because I was driving my new car, which I bought last Mother's Day. That's a whole story in itself. I just thought I would celebrate the ease it has brought me. It's a 2007 Ford Focus and it really looks good parked next to my neighbor's tulips. I'll post more about the iris farm trip in a few days.

Fragrant Rhododendrons

Ever since I read the book Tales of the Rose Tree by Jane Brown and learned that the earliest rhododendrons, brought to England from Nepal and China by plant explorers, were fragrant, I’ve been searching for a fragrant rhododendron. Seattle is rhododendron city; there’s a rhodie on every block, practically every yard. It’s our state flower after all. But, despite sniffing every rhodendron I passed, I couldn’t find one with any scent. That’s partly because, as with other highly hybridized flowers, the scent has been bred out of them in favor of big blossoms and vivid colors.

Then on May 1, when I was leaving the Museum of History and Industry after a great reunion of Nearby History participants, I smelled the most intoxicating fragrance. I looked around and the only blossoms in sight were on a huge rhododendron with large white flowers. So I thought I would try sniffing the blossoms. Ah! A heavenly aroma. A truly fragrant rhododendron.

A few days later, I was celebrating an impromptu May ceremony with some friends, tossing wreaths into the lagoons at the end of the Arboretum, when I saw another white rhododendron, right next to the gatehouse that leads into Broadmoor. I pointed it out and we went over to smell it. Again, that intoxicating fragrance, a lot like honeysuckle. We stuck our noses deep into the blossoms to inhale the scent and when we raised our heads, there were smudges of pollen on our noses and sticky pistils. The flower had lured us, hapless pollinators, to spread its seed around. A perfect ending for May Day.

The photograph above is not either of the bushes described but it may be the same cultivar. This is Polar Bear and it’s a fragrant rhododendron offered for sale by Banwy Valley Nursery in the UK.

The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery has a wonderful list of fragrant rhododendron cultivars.

I was especially fascinated by the distinctions made in describing their scents. Bill Massey is very fragrant with cinnamon/chocolate overtones. Fragrantissimum smells of honeysuckle and nutmeg. And Fragrantissimum Improved has “an almost tropical fragrance with nuances of jasmine and cloves.” McNabbi smells like nutmeg and Mi Amor has hints of musk and tarragon. Paul Molinari has the scent of wild honeysuckle (I have a feeling this is the cultivar I enjoyed) while Scott’s Valentine smells like jasmine. It’s enough to make me run out and buy some rhododendrons for my garden.

One thing this flower project is doing for me is making me fall in love with flowers I always disdained (like the bergenia and the big showy, scentless rhodies).

May Flowers

As we do every May Eve, my daughter and I went out last night at midnight and wandered around our neighborhood in the dark, armed with bags and clippers, looking for fragrant flowers in the parkways and the alleyways (where we consider them fair game). This year, to our astonishment, there were no lilacs in bloom (except at the very top of the bushes where we couldn't reach them). We brought home a few buds hoping to force them in the warmth of our house but with no success. This tells me that spring is truly late this year (I've been refusing to believe it, since other flowers, like the daffodils, bloomed on time.) The only May flower which is blooming on time is the sweet woodruff, the plant traditionally used to flavor May wine.

The picture of the little basket is from last year when we had a better haul, and shows one of the offerings we left on all the doorknobs in our apartment building. This year we simply filled all the vases in our apartment.

Are your May Day flowers blooming on time or are they late, like ours?

The Mystery Plant

At the start of March, I embarked on a new topic in my year-long quest to learn about flowers. I began to focus on plant identification. I read Botany in a Day by Thomas J Elpel, a wonderful book that teaches you to identify plants by learning about plant families, then went out walking, eager to apply my newfound knowledge.

Unfortunately, I ran into a snag right away. I decided to identify the plant on the left. I call it the snail plant because snails love to eat the leaves and it usually looks pretty ratty by this time of year (the one on the left is looking pretty good). I used the process of keying out described by Elpel and quickly established that this was a Pyrola or wintergreen. I was thrilled! I had identified my first plant. Wanting to confirm my conclusion, I Googled Pyrola only to find out: this is not a Pyrola.

I was relating this story over lunch to some friends and one of them after hearing my description (round leaves with scalloped edges, pink flowers on red stalks) suggested my mystery plant was bear's britches. Again more excitement.

I rushed home and Googled Bear's Britches, the common name for acanthus mollis, the ancient plant whose leaves often decorate the capitals of Roman columns. Unfortunately, my plant is not Acanthus mollis (although I did have the good fortune, now that I know about it, to find an Acanthus on my walk to work this morning)

So I was sulking and feeling like I couldn't post anything because I was such a failure as an amateur botanist. Then I realized, this is what the Internet is for. One of you will surely recognize this plant. Can you tell me what it is? I look forward to your wisdom.

One thing that has happened as a result of my quest is that I now love this plant that I used to hate. I'm much more intimate with it now, having pried apart the five pink petals to count the ten tiny white stamens. I admire the combination of colors the bloom displays as it fades: the vivid magenta of the petals, the greenish-purple sepals and the deep maroon of the stem.

Spring Equinox in the City: An Iris Blooms!

It's not a glamorous photo but it records a sighting that made my heart leap with joy! The first iris bud of the year. Spotted at the corner of Broadway and John in Seattle on the first day of spring.

When I went to write this into my phenological journal, I noted that the first iris bud appeared in the front yard of the apartment building across the street a week earlier (Mar 13) in 2005. I wonder if there is one over there right now? I will have to go check.

Besotted by Violets

I spent the last week in a happy haze of violets.

It all began when I bought a chunk of violet-scented soap from Lush, my favorite source for hand-made soap and bath bombs.

It was named Gratuitous Violet in an internal rhyme that made me smile. Immediately, it became my favorite soap, a pleasure to slide over my skin, the sumptuous scent lingering on my skin in a shimmer of fragrance for hours. It reminded me of the scent of irises (and I have since learned they share a common chemical compound: ionone) which I love. It is floral without being pretty, sweet without being saccharine, with a hint of dark spiciness. It did not seem familiar to me, and this is probably good, since many people seem to associate the scent with old ladies doused with violets and powder.

The soap soon became an addiction. Alas, on my last trip to Lush on Winter Solstice, I discovered they were discontinuing this soap. I bought the largest piece I could afford and am still doling it out, one little slippery shard at a time, but meanwhile it was time to look for a new supply of violet scent.

I’ve been haunting perfume review sites for some months, eavesdropping on the fabulous discussions of perfumes far too expensive for me to dream of buying a bottle, where I learned about the Perfumed Court, a small company run by three women perfume addicts who got the bright idea of selling samples of decanted perfumes from those big expensive bottles so people like me could try these extravagant pleasures for a minimal price. I searched for “violets” on their web site and found that they offered a violet sampler which I immediately ordered.

While I was waiting for my violet sampler to arrive, I received an email from a Living in Season reader who had read my wistful comment that I had never smelled a real violet as I didn’t believe they grew in Seattle. Not so! She replied. Martha had violets growing in her yard and she volunteered to give me some for my garden. So last Sunday I drove to Martha’s house and we got on our hands and knees and pried them out from among the day lily bulbs.

Martha had several varieties: parma violets with their almost psychedelic red-violet color, and delicate pale apricot colored violets, but the real prize for me were the sweet violets (viola odorata). The tiniest of the lot, you couldn’t smell them unless you got down on your hands and knees and stuck your nose inches from the soil. No wonder violets are so often associated with humility (in the language of the flowers) as they bring us so low to appreciate their fragrance. But the scent! It was intoxicating! Martha told me she picks a few stems and floats them in water. The scent, she said, is so strong it imbues the water with fragrance.

I rushed my transplants home and planted them in my plot in the community garden. The apricot-colored violets have been the happiest with the transfer, but the others are surviving, though they still look a bit crushed. I did pluck three stems of the sweet violets and placed them in a glass of water on my desk where I could periodically reach out and bring it to my nose. The scent is heavenly.

And then my perfume sampler arrived. Thus began a week of prying open tiny glass bottles, one at a time (remembering one of my prized possessions as an adolescent, a box of perfume samples packing in skinny glass ampules, as thin as toothpicks, which you snapped open to release the few drops of liquid inside). Every night I daubed my wrists with violet-themed perfumes, then spent a happy hour trolling the Internet reading perfume reviews.

The jargon amazed and baffled me. Reviewers raved about silage and top notes, threw around terms like dry-off and dark base. It was like being at a wine tasting with a bunch of snobby connoisseurs. One reviewer found notes of blond hay, tobacco, mint, aniseed and violet in a perfume where I smelled merely intense, obnoxious sweetness. To my delight, the perfumes I liked the most were the simplest and the most true to the violet scent: Violetta di Bosco and Violettes de Toulouse, named after the French city which celebrates the violet with a festival every year. I think I will have to visit next year.