you wouldn’t guess we have
native plants
waterfalls
towering old trees (this one a kentucky coffee tree)
wildflowers
magical floating spheres amid reeds
more wildflowers
But we do.
When you come to New York, go to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty, by all means, but visit the Botanical Garden in the Bronx if you want to get your green on.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
They’re too pretty. They distract you from all the miseries around you, inside you. They are beautiful effortlessly, which puts everybody to shame.
One of my favorite poems, Walking Around by Pablo Neruda, opens with these lines:
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
He goes on in that vein for a while. Then comes the line I’m thinking of, thinking of flowers:
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily
So fresh flowers can be pretty outrageous, pretty powerful.
Sometimes I prefer the two dimensional.
That is still-life painter Eliot Hodgkin’s “May.”
The scent almost wafts off of the nineteenth century Johan Laurentz Jensen’s clutch of lilacs.
It’s a relief sometimes to have flowers that stay safely on canvas.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
when you first noticed flowering trees? Think about it.
I had an apple tree in my back yard when I was a kid and I sure never noticed its blossoms. Later, living in my 20s on Manhattan’s upper west side, where the medians were a jungle of pear trees, I remember having the certain knowledge that all the blooms popped open the same night. It was a romantic view and I was a romantic.
Much later, when we lived in the Cabin, we had a magnolia that survived a late winter storm, but one hefty branch fell off, into the marsh below.
It was early spring, the tree was still in bud, and as the weather warmed up, the fallen branch blossomed as generously as the tree itself. It was another kind of romance, the romance of a miracle.
What flowering tree did you see first?
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
in the desert and you see something astounding. I am parched. I crave liquid, anything, water, iced coffee, beer. Desert plants thrive in the heat of the sun. Without water, they ooze color. Yellow desert marigold, a member of the aster family.
The flame of indian paintbrush.
Or these more delicate desert mallow.
Textures seem improbable, like the flirty catkins of the mesquite.
Or the haunted-house barbs of the fishhook cactus.
The prickly pear, just on the verge of busting out.
Back home on the east coast, so far away, the pretty cherries are in bloom. Daffodils mildly wave their snouts. Forsythia, rich but somehow insipid, you can find it at the edge of all the roads.
Here there is drama.
The blue bell jar of sky covers everything. Magnifies it all. Holds you as if you are pinned, gape-mouthed, in thirst and in awe.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
It’s kind of murky on this St. Patrick’s Day in the Hudson Valley of New York. Let’s get a little color with a bougainvillea gone haywire:
And a little inspiration from Seneca:
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
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Jean Zimmerman 