All the gardens I had made or cared about.
Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England
mulch. Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet
peas--fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums--hybrids
taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies
and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals--of planting the grains,
setting out the frail seedlings--and walking the later carpet--a
hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas
and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums,
forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and
Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against
white clapboard--red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I
thought of sunflowers growing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers
and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock
garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the
great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in
the slope--on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the
hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and
a place for a pool below.
Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and
narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid
whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of
springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups--and
the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming.
Next, I thought of the woodland flowers--flowers before men found
them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets,
the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchis standing in
a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants--red rubber
flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues
and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns--goldenrod, when the clear air
cooled--when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the
enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration.
I, too, migrated.
I came to my other home in Florida--the crashing flowers, the trees
bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana,
bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda. Extravagant vines--alamanda, yellow
as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets,
pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine.
Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking
butterflies--great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned
above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky.
Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts.
Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow.
And trees. Great God, the trees!
It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes.
All good.
All beautiful.
A great magic given to the modern man who thought of beauty never.
Or who thought beauty was a ship's engine, or the line of high
ferroconcrete, or the color scheme of a porch, or--adoring Christ
forgive us, a new car! Something _he_ made, anyhow.
This was some of my lives.
Ricky had shared a number of them with me--created and divided the
hours and days in the years of the flowers.
Why should I wonder concerning anything, who knew and loved flowers
like this--why not, in the continual floral celebrations, take all
content from marvel itself?
Men missed it, most of them.
Generals detailed insensate GIs to set square borders of ageratum
around the headquarters lawn.
Statesmen wore bachelor's-buttons into their deadlocks. Or maybe
carnations.
Dowagers and whores--cattleyas: spilled on avid breasts and icy
shoulders.
Millionaires decreed. Gardeners dug. Who looked--who saw?
Business executives had something sent up for the office, daily, and
never noticed the color or knew the name. Flowers executed and embalmed
to add their priceless prestige to dirty bucks.
Schoolboys planted beans and watched the halved cotyledons ascend. Then
grew and prospered and spent their lives sawing women in half.
At last, tired relatives recriminated while they embedded melancholy
metal pots in the green grittiness of graves.
Who cherished?
Who left them alone in the forest?
Who else--like Ricky--knew each plant to be an individual?