If you've been here, you've seen me zip in a few directions lately, as I notice the way different things around us communicate.
Today, I will leave the roadway and explore the natural world - again reflecting where I've spent time lately - to look at what the garden says to us.
If you have one, or enjoy foliage in others' yards, you're seeing lots of action if you live above the Equator. Areas where only a week ago hopeful tufts of green poked out are now replaced by countless shades of green, often dotted with the brilliant blasts of colour from bulb flowers and early-blooming perennials.
I can never look at flowers without ascribing personalities and 'souls' to them, so I'm almost anthropomorphic in describing them. Bear with me - I have a point related to communication, however tenuous you might find it.
Consider the tulips in the photo here. Don't they seem to say "Here we are! Hello, world! How can you not love us!?" And doesn't this evoke the same feelings of hope and renewal in many of us when we see them? Along with the simple joy the colours transmit, bulbs and perennials always inspire me to cope better with whatever's going on in my head. Because, after all, if these li'l plants can come back each year, seemingly out of nowhere, then I can 'come back' from whatever's dogging me.
Garden supply catalogue writers would probably be lost without descriptors like 'cheery', 'shy' or even 'flirty.' Maybe they're referring to the way those species make us feel when we look at them. But I think they, too, look at flowers as having personalities.
Think of the tiny Johnny Jump-up, as it pokes through the even tinier crack between two patio stones to put its delicate, fragile 'face' out to the world; or the Forget-me-not blooms that seem to find their way metres away from where their first seeds were planted - and can set root into places flowers don't seem to belong. In later summer, we are greeted by those Sunflower faces that peer down at us from 9-foot-tall stalks, and purple coneflowers, their petals thrust back from their centres like hair blown back by the wind.
I have a huge, climbing Golden Clematis plant that, when it goes to seed, looks like a bunch of fuzzy-haired Dr. Suess characters. I've always called these "the Whos from Whoville" in homage to those optimistic Grinch story villagers. A teacher friend who's also passionate about gardening made the very same comparison one day, when she visited my garden.
Then, by extension, we see the out-and-out glee among the bees and other bugs who pile on as soon as those blooms appear. You only need to see a honeybee with its legs and stomach covered in bright yellow dust, its flight slowed and uneven as it tries to fly weighted down by all that pollen, to see what I mean. Even so weighed down, the bee seems thrilled. And then again, the trilling of birdsong in the background doesn't hurt the joyful, lovefesty mood.
Either I'm onto something in articulating how flowers communicate - or I should get out of my garden and back into the 'real world' of technology distractions and cellphone jockeys on the road...
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