Laughing In Flowers

‘The world laughs in flowers’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In May last year my husband and I went to Amsterdam for a week. We had been decades ago and things had changed, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not recapture the memories of that visit. Too many years and too much water had flowed under the bridge, or maybe bridges in this case. I wanted to re-live that holiday but I was older, slower, and a little bit deafer. The body wanted to hole up in a café and eat pancakes. It did not want to explore, though of course we did.

One of the places we visited was a flower market. I think it had moved from barges tied up along a canal, to be on ground. I have gardener friends and I was determined to buy tulips for them. Who doesn’t want tulips from Amsterdam growing in their borders?

I bought a pack of tulip bulbs. I had anticipated there would be a dozen bulbs and I could share them out and keep a few. There were four, and each of them was in some stage of rooting. Not clean and new, I wasn’t even sure if they were plantable. I gave the least sprouted to the gardener I thought may be least experienced, and the most sprouted to the experts. They turned them in a palm and muttered but decided to plant them anyway. I was less than the least experienced, and four bulbs don’t go a long way. Very little, plant-wise, survives my garden. I am in the process of grieving as rhubarb planted last year, that had every evidence of pushing out leaves this year, appears to be killed off by snow and cold temperatures. My porridge will have to wait a while for rhubarb to join it in the bowl.

The Tulip Psychology Research Centre has found that people who receive tulips as a gift are more likely to feel more happy and grateful than those who receive other types of flower. Doubtless to say, the Rose Psychology Research Centre, if there is one, would make the same claims about roses and the Dandelion Psychological Research Centre would say the same about dandelions.

One of my friends posted a picture of her tulip. She had planted it by a tree. She wasn’t sure where she had planted it, but then it began to grow. Another friend showed me her tulip in a pot. Unlike my rhubarb it had weathered the snow and the cold. She had intended to put it in the shed to shield it from frost but didn’t get around to doing so. I feel very much like a proud mother looking at her babies when I look at the picture and the tulip in the pot.

My tulips, my non-Amsterdam tulips are just opening. Very red, with a very black heart – not in the moral sense I must add. They are fighting for soil space with the daffodils in a wee bit of border.

None of my friends did anything but plant a bulb. I am not sure whether they tested the soil to find the right spot or constructed pie charts of sunlight hours or rainfall. I get the impression that seeing the bulbs were rooting they just wanted to get them into the soil. I don’t get the impression either that they talked to the bulbs, sang them songs or danced about the spot where they were planted. They didn’t dig them up every so often to check on them. They left them alone, however many inches under the soil where they buried them. Whatever nature does to make things grow, nature did, and the tulips grew.

The tulips were never going to flourish in the paper bag I bought them in, although they did try. Their natural environment was the soil.

It seems to me that we spend a lot of time trying to work out what our natural environment is. And when we find it, oh how we grow and flower!

Tulips

Who is watching as you stand so tall?

Who takes note when your petals fall?

What if the gardener doesn’t stop to admire

Your blazing colours and your fragile attire?

You track the sun’s path across the blue sky

And bend as you listen to the soft wind’s sigh

Such beauty attracts and the bees clamour round

Seeking your heart where the sweet nectar’s found

The Maker who clothed you, takes note of each day

From the first tender shoot, till you wither away

As you dance in the sun, He takes such delight

Your worship to Him is a glorious sight.