We in Grantham woke up to a winter wonderland this morning—our first snow of the season.  It may seem like an odd time to talk about Spring I but believe it is the perfect time.  Months ago, the forward thinking Grantham Garden Club purchased hundreds of daffodil bulbs to brighten up downtown Grantham.  GGC volunteers planted them last week.  Having this opportunity to chat was a rare treat these days.  It’s amazing how an hour’s work planting bulbs goes by in an instant when you’re simultaneously talking with friends.  Next May when you see those charming yellow trumpet flowers pop up, think of the GGC and how much we love our town.

When all those daffodil bulbs were safely put to bed, I did a little research.  I learned that the daffodil is the national flower of Wales and is incorporated in the imagery for the whole of Britain—daffodils entwined with red and white Tudor roses, the Scottish thistle and the Irish shamrock.  Here’s an interesting fact: the Welsh Isle of Scilly pays an annual rental of one daffodil a year to Prince Charles of England. That’s something we don’t seem to do here in the States but I wish we did.  Though they’re native to Europe and North Africa, daffodils are grown and loved all over the world.  They only bloom for twenty days which makes them that much more special when they do. 
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I contacted our Welsh GGC member Liz Knox to ask her about daffodils in Wales, and here’s what she wrote “You do see them everywhere in Wales…. planted loosely in grass …  I discovered when our four year old was in the village school that in her school and apparently in most elementary schools in Wales, all the children bring daffodils to school on March the 1st … St David’s Day (patron saint of Wales)    Which is also interesting in that it tells you that most years the daffs are well out by March 1st!!!”
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Daffodils are so popular that a Daffodil Society was established in Great Britain in 1898.  The society is still active today.  Their website includes a section dedicated to wild daffodil sites.  When we’re really free to travel this world again, I have decided that I’d like to go to Wales and England in March and visit some of the trails. One of the places they recommend is Ullswater Way which is where William Wordsworth saw a field of daffodils and was inspired to write his famous poem which begins:

​I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Here in Grantham last spring, soon after the daffodils bloomed, something unexpected happened.  On May 9th, it snowed.  It was heartbreaking to see these fresh new flowers bent under the weight of a heavy, wet snow.  I should have had more faith.  By afternoon, the snow melted and the stems straightened themselves up and pointed the blossoms toward the sun.  I am in awe of the strength of these fragile little flowers and hope to emulate their patience and endurance. 
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I’d like to tell you about a field of daffodils I happened upon when I went for a walk in Brookside Park this past May.  There must have been fifty of them in a quiet glade.  They took my breath away.  I plan to visit them every year and encourage you all to do the same.  Thank you to the wonderful folk who planted all those bulbs.  If you planted those daffodils and you’re reading this blog, please let me know who you are.  And if you plant more, I’d like to help.  

Pictures above are Sharon Parker, Janie Clark, a Grantham Scarecrow Lady (who didn't help at all) and Kathy Houghton who planted daffodil bulbs at the Triangle Garden in the downtown Grantham.

Just as life is fleeting and requires our attention to be appreciated, so too is the case with a class of wild flowers called ephemerals.  In that brief time after the earth thaws and before the trees leaf out and block the sun, these flowers make their appearance. Within a few short weeks, these ghost flowers are nowhere to be found. 
The first to show up is the famous trailing arbutus.  For years I have walked by them, but, without a slow pace and an observant eye, I was oblivious to these amazing flowers. If it wasn’t for Sue Coakley, I would never have seen them.  At a Zoom garden club meeting in very early May, Sue announced that the trailing arbutus were in bloom. I followed her instructions to “head south down the Troll Path, look on the slope on the left across from a big rock above the brook.”  So I searched and just when I was about to give up, my treasure hunt was successful.  Voila!  Its Latin name Epigaea repens means to creep upon the earth. The Potawatomi believed that this special flower came directly from the hands of their divinity.  It was given the name Mayflower by the pilgrims who survived their first brutal winter in the New World.  This never-before-seen flower brought them hope.  In 1918 it became the state flower of Massachusetts.

Another amazing ephemeral is the trout lily.  It is so beautiful that it’s hard to believe it isn’t a cultured flower that botanists took years to perfect.  But what about that crummy name?  At the base of each plant are telltale leaves—speckled, elongated and looking like brown brook trout.  I never noticed the leaves since I was enraptured with its delicate, yellow petals. 

Trillium falls into this category too.  I loved getting the word from GGC members that the trilliums were in bloom.  These short, downward facing flowers were a challenge to photograph. I often hoped that no one was looking at the odd sight of a grown woman lying prone on the ground.  I was afraid that someone might call an ambulance or the loony bin. My camera in hand was my proof of normality. 

Another horribly named but truly lovely ephemeral is the blood root.  It got its ugly name from the reddish colored sap that appears when it’s damaged.  No name could be more the antithesis of these white angels. 
The last one I want to tell you about is the pink lady’s slipper.  I am lucky that three appear in my yard every Spring.  They seem to pop up to their twelve inches over night, but pink lady’s slippers take many years to grow from seed to the mature plant. Happily, they can live for twenty years or more.
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Despite some having lousy names, at least the word “ephemeral “ is wonderful and perfectly describes these fleeting gems of the earth.  

A big thank you to the people who alerted me when these ephemerals were in bloom:
Anne Langsdorf, Elise Kendall, Ellis Robinson, Janie Clark and Sue Coakley 

My first memory of bees was not a happy one.  As a child running barefoot through a sprinkler in my backyard, I inadvertently stepped on a honey bee and was shocked at the pain of the sting.  My mother put mud on the scary, white blotch with a red center and made me feel better--at least psychologically.  Ammini Moorthy, our hard working GGC Scholarship Chair, was given a very different treatment for bee stings.  She grew up on a farm in a remote village in the foothills of the Western Ghats in Kerala in India.  When she got stung by a bee, her dad would take her to the cow shed and let the cow lick her sting.  The sandy texture of the cow’s tongue removed the stinger in no time.  Ammini has sweet childhood memories of bees too.  Bees would form hives high up in the trees in her village.  A honey extractor would climb up and harvest honey as everyone watched below.  The entire village shared the tasty treat.
   
My son Glen had an interesting first encounter with a honey bee when he was five years old. I noticed him bending over a flower and asked him what he was doing.  He told me he was “patting a bee,”  I was horrified until I saw that he was indeed successfully patting a docile bee.  He had watched an episode of the Children’s Television Network program 3-2-1 Contact, about bees and pollination and he did a little research on his own. Not surprisingly, Glen grew up to become a scientist and works for the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  (Excuse the proud Mom brag :-)

Our club was lucky enough to have Troy Hall, a commercial beekeeper from nearby Plainfield, New Hampshire, talk to our members at our monthly meeting last Friday.  If you missed it and would like hear his entire presentation, go to granthamgardenclub.org and find it under Presentations.  I enjoyed watching it last night and highly recommend you give it a look. 

Troy practices sustainable, pesticide free beekeeping.  Half of Troy’s hives are dedicated to raising queen bees that beekeepers from all over the country purchase. These queen bees have proven their hardiness by surviving at least one of our harsh winters.  A queen bee lays between 175,000 to 200,000 eggs each year with those offspring inheriting her strong genes and contributing to Troy’s success. Although he calls his a small apiary, Troy sells 15,000 pounds of honey a year.  I picked up a jar of Hall Apiaries Grade A (Unheated/Raw) Honey at Rum Brook Market and now I’m hooked on his incredible product. 

If we didn’t know it before, we now know from Troy how crucial bees are to our very survival.  The GGC website has in depth information on bees and other pollinators.  Go to granthamgardenclub.org and under Resources, click on Pollinator Information.  You’ll find a long list of plants with good pollinator value so you can help sustain these invaluable insects.  
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As I was surfing around the internet looking for fun facts about bees, I came across this Ted Talk by zoologist Lucy King about elephants and bees.  It’s twelve minutes long so I recommend you make yourself a cup of tea, add some honey, sit back and enjoy this fascinating video. 
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/909193427/lucy-king-how-can-bees-keep-the-peace-between-elephants-and-humans

Years ago I spotted a large rectangular plot of Dr. Seuss-type plants in the Boston Public Garden across from the Swan Boat ride launch. Flowers weren’t my usual photo subjects back then but these guys certainly caught my eye. I now know those whimsical flowers were Purple Sensation Alliums and that they are a species of onions. 
Ornamental onions sounded like an oxymoron to me, but now I know better.  Many of the gardens I visited this summer included them.  I learned from the gardeners that besides being lovely, they ward off those hoofed locusts better known as deer.  Seems the onion family of plants gives off an odor that steers deer clear of them.  For those hungry deer undeterred by the smell, they take a taste, make a face and walk away. This not only benefits the onion plants themselves but their flower neighbors.  I learned that Allium and other onion plants are low maintenance and drought resistant which certainly came in handy this summer. 
When I researched Alliums for this blog, I learned that they were grown at the Imperial Botanical Gardens in St. Petersburg starting in the late 1800’s. The flower loving Brits heard about them, swiped some from the Russians, and soon started growing their own and making new varieties.  Today there are more than 800 types. 
The obvious question is “Are they edible?”  From what I could find they are indeed edible but there were so many cautions about pesticides and eating the right types that I’ll leave that to you to decide whether or not to eat them.  For me, I’ll stick to taking pictures of them.  

Ornamental onions and wild chives from the gardens of Anke Clews, Janie Clark, Jane Verdrager, and Ruth Stavis

​Since I became obsessed with taking pictures of flowers, I have seen things I had never noticed before—things that have been right in front of my eyes.  I remember as a kid, waving milkweed pods and loved watching the cloud of fluffy silks scatter their seeds.  I hadn’t given it any thought but assumed the pods started out as itty-bitty pods and grew to the fat, green sacks I picked. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that milkweeds grow balls of tiny blossoms first.

It reminds me of something Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say in A Scandal in Bohemia.  In response to Dr. Watson’s query about how Holmes can figure out so much more from looking at the same scene, Holmes tells the good doctor “You see, but you do not observe.”  Since the pandemic changed my life, I have been taking more time, looking more closely, and observing.
 
I was delighted when I first spotted the milkweed blossoms.  I planned to take pictures of the process and visited the milkweed patch again and again.  Before I knew it, there were the big green pods I remembered as a kid.  I even searched youtube for time lapsed photography of the process but milkweeds have eluded even them. The best I can do is to show you some photos of how they look at the beginning and the end.    
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I tried to take pictures of Monarch butterflies sipping their nectar but could only manage a small white moth.  I wanted to find a Monarch chrysalis hanging on a milkweed leaf.  I searched all over the leaves looking for fat yellow and black striped caterpillars chomping on their milkweed feast. Sadly luck was not with me.  If you have any milkweed growing near you and spot a chrysalis or caterpillar, please let me know.  I’ll be right over. 
The take-away for me is that even though the metamorphosis from blossom to pod seems magical, it’s elementary my dear reader.  (Groan ;-)