04-30-2021, Friday, Sunday and windy
Up until 1975, when I was 10, China had no shopping malls and there were no perfumes nor pretty clothes in the shops in my hometown of Zigong. Our clothes were hand-made by Yeyi, our nanny, usually in plain gray, brown, or blue colors.
In this period of material shortage, my mother who loved flowers taught me to love flowers.
In 2020, I spent an entire year in the small city of Waltham. Because of the COVID-19 situation, I had the time to intensively explore Waltham in terms of flowers and I enjoyed many flowers that I didn’t usually see in California.
I have rarely seen lilacs in Silicon Valley in past 20 years. In May 2020, I saw small four-pedals purple lilac flowers formed in upwards-pointing-cone clusters with heart-shaped green leaves almost everywhere: on the roadsides, on the campuses, and in the front of the houses. While walking by lilac blossoming bushes, I felt the rich lilac fragrance clinging in the air. It hugged me loosely for a moment, a joyful experience.
I thought that the dogwood flower was very rare, because there were only a few very tall dogwood trees among Filoli’s big collection of camellia trees. From late April to May in Waltham, I frequently saw dogwood flowers in the front of houses along the roadsides. Dogwood blossoming towards the sky, in white or pink, on bare branches, very pretty. It seems no smell to me. It is the state flower of North Carolina and Virginia. Actually, the four-pedal cross-shaped flowers we saw are bracts which are modified leaves found in between a traditional leaf and the real flower. Its true flowers are the greenish-yellow clusters at the center of the cross-shaped bracts.
I learned about the mountain laurel in June 2020. Mountain laurel is an evergreen shrub and the flower buds look like fruits to me. First time I saw the buds of mountain laurel, I was puzzled: “I haven’t seen the flowers yet, how can it already bear fruit?” A few days later, I learned that the fruits were actually the flower buds. The color of mountain laurel flowers were bright in red, white, or mixed with red and white varied by bushes. One flower is a full circle in a single petal, many flowers form a very crowded bunch, contrasted by the dark green elliptical leaves. Mountain laurel flowers are very pretty but the entire tree is poisonous. Mountain laurel is a native flower of Eastern America and is the state flower of Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
Petunia are popular summer flowers in bright colors, such as red, white, blue, and purple. I was impressed to see black petunia in the spring house on Lyman Estate in late October 2020, as black flowers are very rare. Later, while babysitting my friend Rachel’s twins in November 2020, I took the twins to see the black petunia in the spring house, through the glass window from outside. In 2021, on my birthday card, one of the twins thanked me for showing her the black flowers.
The most memorable flower I saw in 2020 in Waltham was the sweetbay magnolia, a pure white flower in a round ball shape with elliptic green leaves that are usually bigger than the size of the flower. This was one of my mother’s favorite flowers, white with fragrance. While introducing the sweetbay magnolia to me when I was little, my mother told me: “The beauty of sweetbay magnolia appears right before its blossom, while it is still budding.” Since then, the sweetbay magnolia stayed in my heart.
As Wang Yangming (a philosopher of Ming Dynasty) once said: “When you don’t see the flower, the flower and your heart are still. When you come to see the beauty of the flower for a moment, you will know that this flower is in your heart now.” After more than 40 years, I saw the sweetbay magnolia flower again, in the Kew Gardens London, I felt like meeting an old friend in a far away land unexpectedly. Again, I was overjoyed to see sweetbay magnolia flowers on the campus of Brandeis University in late June 2020, as I knew sweetbay magnolia is hard to find. While standing in front of the sweetbay magnolia bushes, I felt my late mother is coming to me with a smile and her words: “The beauty of sweetbay magnolia appears right before its blossom, while it is still budding. ”
Little Episodes
In 2020 in Waltham, I learned and saw other flowers, such as viburnum carlesii, the pink-white five-pedal small flowers in a round ball with intense sweet scents, white redbuds (usually in purple), and yellow berberis flowers.
1. Lilac
2. Dogwood：
White bracts:
Pink bracts:
Real flowers in green-yellowish
Bright red fruits of dogwood
3. Buds and flowers of maintain laurel
Mountain Laurel is poisonous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmia_latifolia
Mountain laurel is poisonous to horses, goats, cattle, deer, monkeys, and humans, due to grayanotoxin and arbutin. The green parts of the plant, flowers, twigs, and pollen are all toxic that may produce neurotoxic and gastrointestinal symptoms in humans eating more than a modest amount. Symptoms of toxicity begin to appear about 6 hours following ingestion include irregular or difficulty breathing, anorexia, repeated swallowing, profuse salivation, watering of the eyes and nose, cardiac distress, incoordination, depression, vomiting, frequent defecation, weakness, convulsions, paralysis, coma, and eventually death. Necropsy of animals who have died from spoonwood poisoning show gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
4. Viburnum carlesii
5. White redbuds
6. Berberis flowers
7. Black petunia
8. Sweetbay magnolia:
