Festival of Flowers

The Springfield Museums' wildly popular monthly series "Culture and Cocktails" always has seasonal themes, but this month's could not have been better planned. March this year came in like a lion and went out like a lion. Winter lingered so long in Massachusetts that I seriously wondered whether spring would ever come. The last two days of March brought bitter cold, snow, sleet, and Arctic winds, and then suddenly this week it's April, the sun is out, the air is soft, and the crocuses are up. And the Museum is having a Festival of Flowers. 

Local florists and garden clubs were invited to submit floral arrangements inspired by various works in the museums. The arrangements are scattered throughout the four museums, placed near the pieces that sparked them. Patrons can pick up a diagram identifying the locations and then it's like a scavenger hunt, roaming around the Quadrangle looking for all of them.

My favorite is the arrangement by Sherry Williams of the Springfield Garden Club, interpreting a glass and bronze Tiffany Studios lamp from 1910. She's spot-on, not only with the colors and the form of the lamp, but with the overall feel of the piece. What amuses me the most is that the lamp is botanically inspired, with its base in the form of a trunk and leaves, and she's taken it back to the original plants. Plus it's pretty and I could totally picture it in my house.

The design team at Flowers, Flowers! took over the entire Blake Court in the Museum of Fine Arts, and did a bang-up job. The interpretation of Herman Herzog's "View of Niagara Falls in Moonlight" has huge cascades of white flowers, frothy moss and a beautiful palette of greys and greens. The interpretation of Joseph Whiting Stock's "The Fisherman with His Dog" is very large, like the painting itself, with a dangly exotic flower to represent the fishing rod and line, and a mirror so that you see yourself as the fisherman. Very whimsical. The interpretation of "Evening at Low Tide, Manomet" has rocks, seaweed, and tight chrysanthemums which look like some form of sea life. Gorgeous.

In the French Impressionist Gallery, Tara Northway Ostrosky had the courage to tackle the Degas, "Rehearsal Before the Ballet," with success I might add. The gorgeous pink parrot tulips, delphiniums, Queen Anne's lace, plum blossoms, combined with sage green leaves,
are the essence of spring.

Cicily Likes Delft

Gemini Rose

Every year my rosebushes bloom on June 1st. By the third week of May they're still showing no signs of being ready, but damned if when I stick my head outside on the morning of June 1st, they're not open and resplendent. Almost worth getting snagged by prickly branches all year round, trying to get in and out of the car in my narrow driveway.

Along the fence is a blood-red climber. On the north side of the house is a stubborn little bush which produces exactly one bloom each year. My favorite is this delicate pink beauty. I cut it almost to the ground last year, but you'd never know it.

Scary Flowers

Last night Priya and I spent the night on the town: Manchester Village. Shopping, of course: that's what the place is famous for. All the upscale outlet stores are here, but in quaint little old New Englandy houses. Anichini and Dana Buchman and Coach and so on and on.

Dinner was a place Priya likes, a Mexican restaurant called Candelero's. Although she herself doesn't drink, she talked me into a margarita, and I must say it was a good one. Straight up (as a cocktail should be), proper glass, no trace of the dreaded sour mix, and a generously salted rim. I make better chilis rellenos and guacamole and flan, but they weren't bad, and the margarita made up for everything.

As exceptional as the margarita was the landscaping around the restaurant. Huge exotic flowers, many of them black. These giant caladiums were one of the few varieties I could identify. It occured to me that a similar planting might be effective for the Emory House. My house is a dead ringer for the Bates Motel, and these flowers were really scary. Add a rickety iron fence, and I bet I'd never get a single trick-or-treater.

My Cymbidium

This is a picture of my magnificent cymbidium orchid, taken last year. Most of the orchids you see in shops are cattleyas, with broad, flat leaves, so this foliage didn't look orchid-like to me at first. I thought when I got it that it was an orchid buried in the middle of some sort of palm foliage, but in fact it's one enormous plant. Four feet tall from the base of the pot to the top of the flower spike.

The plant is still green and healthy, but it didn't bloom this Easter. I'm not experienced with orchids, and I hadn't ever fertilized it for fear of burning it.

Cymbidiums are quite hardy. But underwatering or underfertilizing them can set back blooming for a year or even more. So I guess I've got to be a bit braver from now on, if I want this orchid to be all it was destined to be.

Spring Field in Springfield

These are the first flowers I've spotted in my neighborhood this year. They're growing in one of the vest-pocket front yards on Mattoon Street, behind just the kind of cast-iron fence that I would like to put around the Emory House. The fence, unfortunately, is slipping further and further down the list as other priorities surface. The flashing needs repair on both chimneys, for example. The exterior walls in the front part of the house need to be insulated. The basement should be waterproofed. I'd love to sand the kitchen floor and stain it a lighter color. It seems to be soft pine with a dark brown colored varnish, very scuffed and messy looking. Most of the walls are a dead grayish-white with a matte finish, impossible to clean. On the other hand, a couple of ominous cracks in the plaster ceilings should probably be attended to before any painting gets done....

One of these days, I'm going to wake up and say to myself, What am I doing with this monstrous money pit? I won't do my children any favors and saddle them with twelve rooms of mahogany, thousands of books, and a cellarful of old junk. At that point I'll start thinking of a very small stone farmhouse in Provençe. But meanwhile, maybe I'll at least plant the crocuses.

Snowdrops

I left for Umbria and Beaujolais on March 12 and I came back on March 20...the first day of spring. Before I left, I said good-bye to winter. To a freezing-cold house, a bleak yard, and a depressing litter-strewn street, which I know only too well since I have to walk the dog up and down it four times a day. I said I'd expect to see forsythia or crocuses or, at the very least, snowdrops upon my return.

So I was excited to see snowdrops before I even got home. On Saturday night, in France, at Château Pierreux, at a lovely dinner hosted by Philippe Bardet of Mommessin. Well, not snowdrops growing, but little glasses of snowdrops as centerpieces, a row of them all down the impressively long table.

The common snowdrop is Galanthus nivalis; i.e., "white flower of the snow." It's the flower that, according to folklore, sprang up from the falling snowflakes to console Adam and Eve when they were driven out of the Garden of Eden into the cold, wintry world. The flower that Odysseus used as antidote to Circe's poisonous drugs. And the subject of one of Hans Christian Andersen's horrid little fairy tales, which I won't synopsize because they creeped me out as a child and still do.

From the common snowdrop is isolated an alkaloid called galantamine. Galantamine acts as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor; that is, it helps maintain normal levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. (Acetylcholine deficiency leads to Alzheimer's disease.) Galantamine is also used to treat headache, neuralgia, polio, and other neurological conditions and diseases.

Not a bad portfolio for such a dinky little flower.

And it was snowdrops, not out-of-season hothouse flowers or exotic blooms flown in from South America, giving the finishing touch to the couvert at a meal which was classy and casual as only the French can do it. We started our meal festively with a glass of crémant, followed by a fish mousse accompanied by a 2004 Monternot Pouilly-Fuissé, then Charolais beef and a gratin de pommes de terre dauphinois with a 2004 Brouilly, a 2003 Réserve du Château, and two dusty unlabelled bottles from the cellars--a 1990 and a 1989 Réserve du Château. Proof in the glass that good Beaujolais can be held. And a lovely, gracious gesture on the part of our host....there weren't too many of those bottles left down there!

This is one of those make-or-break years for me. And the first day of spring is the beginning of the year, for Persians anyhow. So I'm going to take the little glasses of snowdrops as omens of hope for the coming year. Relaxing in the Château Pierreux after a hard day of wine-tasting, raising a glass of crémant to Pamela Wittmann and Philippe Bardet, the air seemed full of promise. If the humble snowdrop could be chez soi, why not I?