Garden catalogs arrive in January. These days, computers tell the companies that I am older and less mobile — and more importantly — have not bought anything from them in recent years, so I receive fewer than before. White Flower Farms is the exception. Their catalog arrives and I dive in.
Multitudes of day lilies lift my spirits. The plant breeders have been busy and Hemerocallis now can be almost white. Another is so close to a scarlet red it nearly shimmers off the page.
I look for the true Geraniums. Not the Pelargoniums we commonly call geraniums, but the finer leafed perennial with an abundance of small composite flowers. Years ago I had one called "Johnson's Blue." It died as the Norway Maple stole its sunlight after three years, but the memory of those blue flowers makes me search the pages, hoping.
Who buys the yellow Lady's Slippers, I wonder? This exotic cost $130 per plant, if I remember correctly. It's a brilliant yellow, like a bit of trapped summer sun.
Mostly, though, they make me think of the treasure my daughter and I found when we went for a walk in a Massachusetts wild area. I was enjoying the scene: we went past enormous grey boulders which had split, leaving a pathway down their midsections — the sort of setting which makes authors write of elves, and small boys instantly become pirates or superheroes. The spring green trees and understory growth were lush and fresh. They hadn't suffered the ravages of too many deer, unlike our sad suburban forests.
The trail turned a corner, and upslope were 14 pink Lady's Slipper plants in bloom. We froze in our tracks, as if moving would startle them and they might flee. In an instant, with my daughter I was connected to my mother, the grandmother she never knew. Mom loved wildflowers and knew many, many by name. Lady's Slippers had grown freely on Long Island when she was a girl, before bulldozers preceded the subdivisions. She frequently reminisced in the spring, nostalgic for those Lady's Slippers. Suddenly, we were seeing them as she had seen them. Wild and profuse.
