Plant and pick flowers for your family’s sake
Pennsylvania winters can be unyielding. Though the extreme, single-digit temperatures and mounds of sometimes-onerous (but always beautiful) snow come and go, the bleak, overcast skies tend to overstay their welcome, hanging around like a monochromatic weight on one’s psyche.
“Western Pennsylvania is known for two things,” UPMC psychiatrist Dr. Lawson Bernstein told CBS News, “producing linebackers and one of the highest prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in the entire country.”
Sigh. While I grumbled this morning about having to continue bundling up well into spring (it was 36 degrees), a bunch of cheery golden blossoms near the edge of the woods reminded me this was no time to feel sorry my myself. I should instead be having a nanny nanny boo boo moment, gloating to my friends and relations in California and Florida who enjoy mild weather year-round. For I have something they do not: a sweet connection to the past and certain hope for the future.
You see, the flowers that reminded me that “hope springs eternal” were planted decades ago by my ancestors. They’re daffodils, known for being “surprisingly cold-tolerant,” hardy, and some of the first flowers to show themselves just when you think winter will last forever. Sometimes they even stand firm in defiance of a late-season snowfall, poking their sunny faces through the frozen blanket to let everyone know the storm is nothing more than winter’s last hurrah.
A friend and I, along with my mother, have made it a tradition to “go daffodilling” on my family’s old farm property when the ten or so varieties are in full bloom (and the snow is finally gone). We traipse triumphantly over green grass — the fresh blades still short, beginning to stretch themselves, as if awaking from hibernation and blinking at the sunbeams that for months were obscured by tundra.
There are patches of flowers here and there, some obviously planted in places near the house where they could be seen. Others, like our clan itself, are scattered in puzzling spots — here a patch on the side of a secluded hill, there a clump blooming singularly in a meadow. It’s something of a treasure hunt. By now, we know more or less where to find the daffodils, but collecting them is still a sport. Our memories are too poor to recall year-to-year which variety grows where, and the surprise of what we find is as delightful as receiving a flower arrangement from a loved one with a variety of blooms to inspect.
There are the clumpy daffodils that are a darker mustard color and resemble a blobby impressionist painting. The more common yellow trumpet daffodil has been prolific, too, but this family is not all the same: this year, I counted six variations of the trumpet. Some are a solid canary yellow. Some are all-white. All have a trumpeted center that’s ruffled on the edge with six symmetrical petals, but one has yellow petals and a distinctively orange trumpet that sets it apart. Another has white petals and a trumpet the color of an egg yolk. Yet another has bright white petals and a pale-yellow middle. They range in size, too, from diminutive and delicate, to rather boorish and overwhelming in a vase.
We try to choose our favorite, but it’s impossible. My mother tends to prefer the less refined flowers, theorizing that the more primitive they look, the older they must be. I gravitate toward the smaller daffodil with a middle that doesn’t protrude like the trumpets, but is nonetheless dramatic in its red-orange color that contrasts against its cream-colored petals (the “poet’s daffodil” I think it’s called?)…
This article was originally published by The Spectator. Read the full piece here.
