Flower Hound
~ by Jeff Tryon
Flowers are the most enduring memorial. Buildings fall down or are destroyed, stone monuments crumble to dust or are worn away by time, but perennial flowers persist through the generations.
When I was born some 60 years ago, my maternal grandmother made the long journey up from Alabama to visit Mother and see the new baby. And while she was here, she planted some Siberian Iris bulbs out back of the old home place near Fruitdale.
Mammy is gone, and Mother has passed, but those flowers continue to put up fresh stalks of flowers every year, reminding me of their joy and passion for flowers.
Mother was what they used to call a“ flower hound.” She and my aunts and cousins were more than just casual flower collectors— they were obsessed with getting more and newer varieties of every kind of perennial flower that flourishes in these parts: the lilies, the peonies, the tea roses, the cone flowers, the verbena, and myrtle. They were always on the lookout for bulbs.
If someone was moving from a place they had lived a long time, or had passed away, the flower hounds were there to dig in their beds. Or if they were visiting someone at some distance away, and admired a certain bloom, the host would insist they take some bulbs.
Mother would actually stop along a county road to dig flowers. She explained that these flowers were on the county right-of-way and technically belonged to everybody. I have since learned that this is not the case— the right of way merely permits the county to maintain a roadway through private property. I doubt that Mother cared about such legalities when faced with the opportunity to get a new kind of flowering plant in her yard.
Up there at the home place, along about mid-
March each year, the snowdrops push up, and from then on until killing frost, something is blooming. There is a stately succession of seasonal blossoms from the irises and peonies and tiger lilies of spring, to June’ s pink tea roses, hostas, and daisies, to the“ surprise lilies”( a. k. a. pink ladies) and purple coneflowers( Echinacea) of August, and everything in between— a lasting monument to Mother’ s passion for perennial flowers.
Throw in flowering bushes and trees: lilacs, forsythia, dogwoods, redbuds, and hydrangea, and it’ s a year-round bloomfest.
Bulb-type flowers propagate by multiplying their bulbs underground. Eventually, they get root bound and they have to be dug up and separated or they will get too crowded and become non-productive. This is a good time to share some bulbs with a neighbor or relative or friend who may not have that particular variety.
When Mother would share bulbs with someone, she wouldn’ t let them thank her.“ It is a part of our job as human beings here on earth to help spread the flowers around,” she said.“ No thanks necessary.”
When we walk back up the Salt Creek Valley into the Yellowwood Forest in the spring, we encounter dozens of little patches of daffodils, often in neat little squares, the ghostly outlines of pioneer cabins which once stood there.
These folks were living on the edge of civilization, out on the frontier with hardly any of the amenities of society at large— but they brought and planted flower bulbs to brighten up their pioneer yards.
The people and their cabins are gone— virtually all traces of them reclaimed by the forest— but the flowers they planted still remain.
My eight-year old grandson, casting a thoughtful eye upon the hundreds of clusters of daffodils scattered over the hills around our little cabin in the woods remarked,“ Grandpa, we’ re rich in flowers!” •
32 Our Brown County May / June 2017