the botanical poet
On the phone, my dad talks about his garden--the lack of rain, how certain vegetables are doing. How it's harder for him to really work for longer periods on it because he's getting older. On the whole, there are less rabbits eating the lettuce (he suspects foxes and coyotes are getting them.) How the neighbor spends a lot of time looking at something in the center of a patch of something that my dad is pretty sure is weed. In August/early September, if the crop is good, the house will be overflowing with tomatoes no one quite knows what to do with except make them into salsa like my mother did semi-resentfully each year.
I have never been able to get plants to grow in my apartment--my windows, which face north are further impacted by taller buildings around--most of my sun is bounced off the side of the cream colored dorm building across the way. I've tried--but between the lack of light and the cats knocking them over, even the tiny succulents I bought a few times don't survive. I eventually replaced them with fakes, so they live in my apartment along with a small faux jade plant and another fake under my bathroom sink. I've thought about purchasing more fakes--mostly to give the illusion of outdoors since I lack a patio or balcony. I spend most of my summers inside anyway--either working or at home and prefer to move about at dusk or in darkness. Days spent out in the sun or heat mostly leave me overly pink even with sunscreen and tired as hell. Even with the beach literally a block away, it's more something I enjoy in passing, but only rarely for longer periods.
In a more hospitable setting, with a garden perhaps, with a yard, I doubt I'd have my mother's fervor for plantings. Each spring, she'd load up at garden centers far and wide to fill the beds around the house, the pots on the deck--mostly annuals like impatiens, geraniums, the occasional black eyed susan. She'd spend the summer dutifully watering them even after long days at work, even when she was utterly exhausted, which always seemed like a lot of work for things that would be dead by October. The perennials she planted still grow even now--a bank of hydrangeas, a trumpet vine, a couple azalea or azalea-like bushes. I once wrote a poem about hydrangeas and a dead mother that was totally fictitious, though my mother was not particularly fussy with her garden. For someone without a green thumb, I have only a poets knowledge of flower varieties--things I looked up to use when writing. It's the same with trees and birds. I am also terribly afraid of spiders and other critters in the ground, so I'd make a poor cultivator.
And yet, I gravitate to flowers, to trees, to all things botanical in both writing and visual art. I laughed when, at my Field Museum reading a couple years back someone in the audience asked if I considered myself a "nature poet." But later ,considered how much attention I pay to the natural world, and really it's a lot. The woman writing poems is the same girl who bent intently over the violets that grew between the driveways of our first house. Who was obsessed with dandelions and four leaf clovers. Who nearly cried when my cousins ripped down my grandmother's bank of lilac bushes to make their driveway bigger. Who has looked up many flowers over the years to inset them into poems--bluestem, for example, which I was using everywhere. Basically those pretty blue flowers trailing every road in the midwest. Thistle and aster which sounds amazing in a line. As do bougainvilia, wisteria, oleander, though they are not local..
When I was making soap for the etsy shop in the late aughts--I loved florals--gardenia, liliac, honeysuckle, lemon verbena. I had a violet pastille variety which was a mix of violet and vanilla molded into fleurs de lis. While using plant matter in soaps is tricky because of decay, I successfully mixed in rose petals, lavender, calendula (another great word, really, we know them as marigolds.) I quite readily plum botanical images for my visual art--most collages have some sort of flowers and plants in them. Most of paintings, if they are not landscapes, they are botanicals. One scan through dgp covers that I design and it's previous obvious how much I love plants & flowers as a visual element. Ditto, my wardrobe, which has a seasonal rotation of dresses with a strict delineation between summer florals and fall. Between winter's back blacked blooms and springs small ditsy prints.
Years ago, when I was struggling with the worst bout of seasonal and general depression, it was a conservatory visit that saved me. This past winter, I longed for lush blooms ad green in February, but everything was still closed for covid. Summer is always something that takes so long to get here and then is over so fast. The year is delineated by flowers, like a clock. Spring is coming when they lift the grass off the Michigan Avenue beds for the tulips, harbored all winter, to begin reaching tiny green tendrils out of the ground. I eye the rampant chrysanthemums they plant each autumn as a foreboding sign (and in truth, they too are beautiful, just get a bad rap as being a sign that less hearty flowers can't survive the frost risks that late in the year.) Last year, during lock down, I mourned less the lack of social interaction than missing spring hallmarks--the magnolia tree near the bus stop, the flowering trees in the park I don't know the names of. The lilac bushes across the street from the library that, when in full bloom, waft across to hit you square in the middle of the block. Landing back out in the world full summer last July, I felt i'd been robbed of my enjoyment of it coming into being.
Not to say, fall also doesn't have it's charms despite the rampant mums in the planters. One day, in late August, the tree near the mailbox at the end of the block will lose all its leaves in a single day without even turning yellow. Similar, another one on my walk outside the Congress Hotel. There is a retirement home that has the perfect mix of fall colored trees in it's courtyard that all shed their leaves around the same time and make an instagram perfect scene right after Halloween. The tree outside my window, that is super tardy at getting it's leaves well into June holds them until nearly the end of November. Winter glosses those same mums and straggly planter leftovers with ice and snow earlier every year it seems.
Probably, when someone in the general work hears the word "poet" they think we are all here writing about flowers and trees and birds or some shit, and they are probably right..
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