Around these parts spring made a dramatic start, but quickly retreated into a protracted period of cool and damp, by no means a serious threat of a return to winter, but far from an invitation to cheerful outdoor activity. So far as the enjoyment of spring’s arrival is concerned, meteorological circumstances have thus cooperated with the severe constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic to mute, to some degree, the impact of what is ordinarily a boisterous annual experience. Many flowering trees are in bloom. Some, indeed, are already beginning to go over. But as I barely go out in the town, what I have actually seen has been limited to my local walks. Most of these do include lovely greening woods and waterside paths along the lake front or the canal tow-paths. Here one does see a few flowering trees, including some tall and spreading ornamental cherries, but there are no architect-designed pleached floral alleys as there are in places on the campus and the center of the town. Under these circumstances, I have gained a renewed admiration for simple old standbys—I’ll call them simply the yellows—that never let you down.
The first of these are the daffodils. Every year they are magnificent, but this year more than ever. The daffodil is dear to my heart for many reasons. Nature is full of ugly ducklings, but the transformation of a wrinkled oniony thing that looks like a cold scrotum into a delicate and magnificent yellow bloom is, so far as I am concerned, better than the ontological argument for the existence of God. Furthermore, with even a minimal attention to care in planting, the daffodil will multiply, it will naturalize, just become a faithful and comfortable part of the scene, asking little of you while offering so very much. Best of all, if you should happen to be outnumbered by deer in your neighborhood by a ratio of ten to one, it may well be the only thing you plant that you can be pretty sure will not become a few molecules of a venison haunch before it can get three inches high. Finally, even more than the red, red rose, it must be any English professor’s favorite flower. Poetry is so endangered in this country that I sometimes think there are more people who write it than who read it. But you generally count on people—at least most pre-millennials—vaguely remembering their Wordsworth as he himself so vividly remembered the waving oceans of yellow flowers. “They flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude, / and then my heart with pleasure fills / and dances with the daffodils.”
But the yellow spring flower that I would perhaps praise even more highly is yet more humble and more commonplace: forsythia. The tiny flashes of yellow along the luxuriant green bushy stems are often the very first indications of spring’s arrival. This year the yellow glints were showing out under the snow. I think that only the snow drops were earlier, and white against white does not make what you would call a vivid display. Daffodils are fairly easy to deal with. Forsythia is almost impossible to kill—and I speak as a gardener who has proved his ability to kill anything. If you cut off a length of forsythia branch and push the cut end into the earth and abandon it, there is a fifty percent chance that it will root and thrive. If you put a few grains of grafting hormone on to it, the chances approach ninety-five percent. Along the main road leading from Route 1 into the town of Princeton there is a stretch of still mainly open land belonging to the university, perhaps half a mile long, For nearly half of that distance there is on one side of the road a gorgeous forsythia hedge from which I have, over the years, taken probably as many as a hundred cuttings. Since the mass of brilliant yellow on the forsythia bushes comes and goes within a month, it is most fortunate that the lush green of the abundant leaves makes the forsythia an attractive edging plant at all seasons of the year.
Quite a few words in the English language derive from the names of actual people, and many of them are somewhat disquieting. One does not want to fall victim to Lynch law, contract Parkinson’s disease, or fail a Wassermann test. What we might call the linguistic Overton window continues to open ever wider so as to allow of Reaganomics and such. Some very great ones lend their names to new-found stars. But the highest achievement of all, to my mind would be to have a flower bearing your name. Look at the bright blossoms (bracts, actually) of the bougainvillea vine, named of course after Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the Gallic Captain Cook. You practically hear the lapping of the waves below the gunnels, or catch a mental glimpse of Gaugin’s Tahitian woman in the red skirt.
The name forsythia honors the memory of William Forsyth (1737-1804), one of several great British gardeners of the classic period. Forsyth is not perhaps as famous as the two Tradescants (>tradescantia) of two centuries earlier; but he was a man of parts who played an important role in the histories both of botanic medicines and of garden architecture. He was born into proletarian obscurity in Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire, an out-of-the-way place that, oddly enough, I actually visited in the late 1950s. The countryside in that northern blade of Scotland is magnificent in a rugged sort of a way, and I remember it as feeling very remote. It probably would have seemed a good deal more so in 1737, when Forsyth appeared on the scene. He made his way to London in the 1760s, where he eventually took charge of the Apothecaries’ Garden in Chelsea and later of the royal gardens of Saint James and Kensington. He is credited with constructing the first English rock garden, using (among other randomly gathered stones) plaques of lava fetched from Iceland. He deserves his halo of brilliant yellow blossom.
