Honeysuckle Blossoms
Tuesday, June 19, 07
Honeysuckle is to my summer what tulips are to my spring: seasonal, iconic memory inducers. While everything and its summer brothers are in bloom here, I zeroed in on a shady fence covered with flowered vines this morning.
Off I went to my mother's garden with its backdrop of dark green honeysuckle vines and pale yellow flowers...she tended zinnias and petunias and marigolds and any number of other seeds painstakingly planted every spring, but the delicate, graceful blossoms were my favorites as a small child, imagining fairies and birds living under the vines' protection.
Then to an engagement long, long ago, where I purchased a vine to grow and use in my wedding bouquets. My hope was to entwine honeysuckle and (another summer favorite) pale blue morning glories. A lesson in gardening taught me that the bouquets would be impossible with real flowers--one would wither. A lesson in relationships (pre-wedding) taught me that this would also be the case with the two of us.
On to my own house in Rochester, that, indeed, I purchased in part because of the familiar vines along the fence, cradling a birdbath where a fountain had once stood. One Sunday afternoon a month from April to September I would cut back rampant wild grape vines along that same fence to entice my honeysuckle to grow farther and thicker and stronger. My reward: July evenings, still and hot, the air humid and just this side of damp, and the intoxicating, unnervingly heady scent of those small, warm blossoms sweating. Fairy housing, well...but magical nonetheless.
Honeysuckle is to my summer what tulips are to my spring: seasonal, iconic memory inducers. While everything and its summer brothers are in bloom here, I zeroed in on a shady fence covered with flowered vines this morning.
Off I went to my mother's garden with its backdrop of dark green honeysuckle vines and pale yellow flowers...she tended zinnias and petunias and marigolds and any number of other seeds painstakingly planted every spring, but the delicate, graceful blossoms were my favorites as a small child, imagining fairies and birds living under the vines' protection.
Then to an engagement long, long ago, where I purchased a vine to grow and use in my wedding bouquets. My hope was to entwine honeysuckle and (another summer favorite) pale blue morning glories. A lesson in gardening taught me that the bouquets would be impossible with real flowers--one would wither. A lesson in relationships (pre-wedding) taught me that this would also be the case with the two of us.
On to my own house in Rochester, that, indeed, I purchased in part because of the familiar vines along the fence, cradling a birdbath where a fountain had once stood. One Sunday afternoon a month from April to September I would cut back rampant wild grape vines along that same fence to entice my honeysuckle to grow farther and thicker and stronger. My reward: July evenings, still and hot, the air humid and just this side of damp, and the intoxicating, unnervingly heady scent of those small, warm blossoms sweating. Fairy housing, well...but magical nonetheless.
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