April flowers
Tulips: Fly Away (orange) and Queen of Night (purple)
Spring has definitely arrived when the tulips bloom.
After a long, gray winter, their absolutely ludicrous depth of color, their wildly voluptuous shapes, help you understand why tulips once inspired a worldwide mania, speculative bubble, and economic crisis. They’re just that type of flower — the kind that stops you in your tracks, no matter how many times you have passed. These flank the entrance to our vegetable garden in two large pots. When I’m in the garden, I pass them a dozen times an hour. Each time, I trace over the petals and the delicately spotted leaves. Each time there’s something new to see: some new transparency or shadow in the sun, some new curl or frill, some funny little bee lolling around in the petals.
The bees are funniest in the creeping phlox, though. This time of year, the low-growing scrubby plant is covered with flat, scented lavender blossoms. The heavy, bumbling bumblebees dive into the plants the way a kid jumps onto a pile of pillows. They swim through the flowers, buzzing and grumbling (happily, I presume, possibly drunkenly), then blunder on to the next patch, dive-bombing right into the puff of blooms.
This year, I won’t cut the tulips to bring inside. They’re simply too beautiful where they are. Over the summer, they’ll be left to die down, returning energy to the bulbs. I’ll save the largest, healthiest bulbs to replant in November. The smaller bulbs will be replanted into my cut flower garden for next year — where if they don’t bloom well, I won’t lose a garden display, and if they do, I can cut them freely. Each year, I’ll buy a few more tulip bulbs, too, to ensure that I always have some tulips with strong, beautiful blooms.
Native plants, like trillium — a native woodlander, like ginseng, ginger, yellow root, and mayapple — are blooming, too, as is the red buckeye, a shrub with glossy green leaves and brilliant red flowers vaguely reminiscent of a Fourth of July sparkler. Little by little, we’re restoring our property with some of these native plants that have been pushed out by habitat destruction, soil compaction and invasive species.
This time of year is also the time I start gathering flowers — especially wild flowers like violets and dandelions — for herbal recipes. I dry violets and mix them with epsom salts and baking soda to make natural bath salts. Violet leaves and flowers can also be used to make a skin balm, as can dandelion flowers (before they puff up and go to seed). I dry dandelion flowers, leave them to soak in oil, strain the oil, then use the oil to make balms, salves and lotions. Dandelions have anti-inflammatory and pain relieving properties, so the salve is good for sore and tired muscles, as well as dry, cracked or itchy skin.