Do you know this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay?
Oh Burdock, and you other dock
Who have ground coffee for your seeds,
And lovely long thin daisies, dear,
She said that you were weeds.
She said, "oh what a fine bouquet!"
But afterwards I heard her say,
"She's always dragging in those weeds!"
I have a mental picture of that mother, steeped in her prize dahlias and fancy glads, completely missing the simple beauty of a handful of field flowers. She'd never stop to look at the intricate pattern of a Queen Ann's lace, as multi-faceted as a snowflake and would probably mistake the tiny purple flower at its center for a bug. She's never dipped a graceful jewelweed under water so that its leaves and orange blooms turn to liquid silver.
Field flowers can be as dull or as absorbing as people at a cocktail party. You might pass by the woman in double knit with a voice like a rusty hinge, but if you knew she'd written four best-sellers and had just adopted an orphan from China, you'd most likely find her entertaining. And who'd talk to that owly-eyed man in knickers, for heaven's sake? But if he's an old friend you haven't seen since he came back from climbing in the Himalayas, you'd be delighted to spot him across the room.
Interesting flower tidbits may not be as juicy as cocktail gossip, but just knowing the name of a flower makes it more appealing, so let's walk up through the pasture and meet a few.
Know the blue-eyed beauty lining the roadsides this month? It's chicory, sometimes called blue soldiers' and right now it's turning the edges of Route #44 sky blue. It is one wildflower that you shouldn't put in a bouquet because by noon is is nothing but a stiff and ungainly bunch of branches, the flowers having disappeared. I wish I'd known that little fact back in 1979 when my nephew's future bride asked me (supposedly the wildflower expert) to provide blue and white wildflowers for her wedding reception. Imagine my horror when I returned from the church and saw the bouquets I'd created - ugly green branches without a touch of
blue jutting out from among the Queen Ann's lace.
You may know this washed-out
green-leaved plant as mullein, but
I like the more dcescriptive names -
beggar's blanket or flannel flower. Its first
year it merely produces a rosette of wooly
leaves, but the following year sends up a
stalk that can be six or seven feet tall,
dotted with yellow blooms. As kids, we
used the sturdy stalks as swords for mock
battles. In olden times the stalks were
dipped in fat and used as funeral torches.
Here's another roadside flower known
as soapwart or bouncing Bet. Neltje
Blanchan, whose charming book
Nature's Garden (published in 1900
and sadly no longer in print) des- cribed as "a stout, buxom, exhuber-
antly healthy lassie, who long ago
escaped from gardens and ran wild"
Usually white, but sometimes
tinged with pink, her blossoms
are fragrant, especially as evening
falls and the sphinx moth flutters
from one bloom to the next,
extracting nectar. The name soapwart
comes from the fact that when its bruised leaves are agitated in water they produce a cleansing, soap-like lather.
This photo is almost as pathetic as the flower,
a member of the mint family called Self-Heal. Its
rusty greenish cone sports one or two tiny bluish
violet flowers today, another one or two next week, a few more later on. I prefer her Latin name, Prunella vulgaris. She reminds me of one of Hank's old girlfriends who could never quite get it all together. The photo to its right is the purple loosestrife, a really handsome wildflower that has become a menace here in New England. I wrote about it last year - you can look in the Archives to read about it.
Know this tall white flower? No, it's not Queen Ann.
The composite flowers are much more tightly packed
and look a bit like brain coral. It's yarrow and has the
same feathery leaves as our garden yarrows. Chewing
the leaves will supposedly relieve toothache. Achilles
treated the wounds of his men with it at the battle of Troy,
hence its Latin name, Achillia.
So many field flowers, but I've already used up my
film. Here's a delicious spot where nothing grows but
moss. How long since you've lain on your back in an
open meadow and felt the earth's pull vanish in a float-
ing cloud? Let's just sink down for a few minutes and
drink in the vastness of the universe. We can meet
more flowers another time.
