Budget blooms, a bug, a snowball
A week of small pleasures in the garden
We begin with
…discount lilies at the Food Lion…
Thrilled. That’s how I felt when I bopped into the Food Lion to pick up butter and eggs and found myself in line behind a manly man of the NASCAR merch persuasion … and saw he had lilies in his cart.
Their curved trumpets looked absurdly white sitting atop his cases of Coke. With a jolt I realized that this was the week after Easter, meaning all kinds of retailers would now be offloading their unsold big box plants at top speed. But — “Wow,” I found myself saying despite my best intentions. “Those look pretty good.”
“Two dollars,” NASCAR dude said, flashing a vee sign along with his grin.
“No way.” Two dollars? The pre-holy day price would have been... OMG.
“Right over there,” he pointed.
I looked … and followed his finger right on out of the checkout line, memories of Easter lilies past dancing in my head. Those times I would totally lay for the Altar Guild ladies during the clean-up after church: Can I take some of those lilies of your hands, sisters?
How happy they’d be to let them go, knowing they were bound for my garden rather than the dumpster behind the church.
In a once-upon-a-time garden of mine, a couple of those rescued plants were to grow waist tall and strong, surprising me year after year with their gay trumpets—though never, of course, exactly at Easter, since it takes a quite ungodly amount of CO2 to produce those container shiploads of lilies to display in church and then throw away…
I shook off those thoughts, though, and filled my cart. There’s a time to lament the waste of our systems and a time to invite the ghosts of old friends into our gardens. Come to me, my lovely girls,” I thought as I sifted through for the best speciments, I’ve got just the spot for you.
They’re he-ere…!
I have an friend who loves the Pittsburgh Pirates and Frieda Kahlo—she’s an art historian from, you guessed it, Pittsburgh—but boy howdy, does she loathe these things…
Laurel was scarred for life by a previous emergence half a lifetime ago in another city, and to be fair, it sounds like something out of a horror show.
But I dunno. I think they’re kinda… pretty.
I’ve been assured by a reliable source—Branwen, who was showing off one in her office at the library—that these this guy are from the 17-year cicada brood, not the 13-year... Whatever that means. (No, I really have no idea, but these guys do.)
[Correction: My apologies. I appeared to have gotten this precisely backwards. Our Cicadas are 13-year Brood XIX, “the Great Southern Brood.” They co-emergent with 17-year Brood III cicadas. (05.09.24)]
So far the numbers have yet to reach horror show proportions. I’ve seen three on the porch and a few others out in the garden.We’ll keep our eyes peeled.
“That old Snowball boosh”
Forgive me for making fun of my mama’s people’s accent—it’s the pure Upstate South Carolina hillbilly twang and my mama hated it, but I love it. It reminds me of “Down Home,” our name for my grandparent’s farm in Ninety Six. The first time I moved to the Upstate, nearly 30 years ago, I thought it was so cute I started imitating it—and found I couldn’t stop. It was hilarious—but a little scary, too. Took a month to get the sound out of my head. I’m more careful which accents I imitate now.
So my mama hated the accent, but what she loved—along with her mama before her—was a snowball bush. And now that I have one of my own I can certainly see why. Viburnum macrocephalum—whether you’ve heard it called Chinese Snowball tree, Snowball Viburnum, or (my personal fave) that old Snowball boosh—it’s soooo spectacular in early spring. The pompoms are canteloupe-sized and, in bright sun or moonlight, they just glow.
They’ll get 15 or 20 feet if they’re happy, and this one seems happy.