native plants

I.
I've always found fake flowers to be profoundly depressing, if sometimes convenient to convey a sense of kitsch.  I am thinking here of the crazy junk man in the nearby seaside town of LB, whose yard used to be filled with plaster Virgin Marys and concrete lawn jockeys and all number of sparkly pinwheels, plus everblooming red pointsettas in shallow plastic windowboxes that were afixed to a white-painted, chain-link fence.




However realistic fake flowers might be, they deny the essence of what I think gardening's all about, which is the passage of time.  (I do not count the way the fake pointsettas moved from harsh red to salt-wind-tattered.  Maybe that's not fair.)  Flowers are beautiful because they don't last, and I find spring exhilarating because it follows winter, and because it won't last, either.   Each season has something to offer, and no plants ever stay quite the same, not even the superficially unchanging evergreens.  Things move from seed to sprout to leaf to maturity to death.  On facebook and in chain emails, people say things like "The present is the only moment there ever is."  That's true, up to a point: but gardening gives you the present and the future.  Seasons will continue, globally warmed or not, forever and ever (or at least as long as we'll know), amen.  But I don't see the beauty in something that so denies the seasons.

II.
When I was in high school, my mother commissioned, for a heavy Waterford crystal vase, an arrangement of silk flowers - maroons, creams, greyish-green foliage - that sat, unsmellable and unadmired, in our unused formal living room.  At the time, I remember sternly objecting to them on the grounds of taste, at which point my mother rolled her eyes and told me to be sure to make a lot of money when I grew up, so that I could afford fresh flowers every week.  When we began to clean out the house two years ago, we came across those same silk flowers, now coated greyish brown, an eerie synthetic simulcrum of the mildew that eventually afflicts all real bouquets.  It turns out that they'd not only been unloved, but also undusted, for a decade or more, and they headed straight into the trash bin, like so many fresh flowers before them.

III.
Waiting to leave my corporate day job this evening, I noticed this vase of, ahem, ever-blooming quince next to the elevator.  At first I was appalled.  I'd been reading Gardening at Sissinghurst on my subway commutes this past weekend, and I admired Harold and Vita's Chaenomeles without knowing at first what it was.  I was all the more pleased when I discovered that flowering quince is just within our growing zone here in New York -  though, apparently, an unwise choice if you've got children or liability concerns.  But this stark, garish quince looked nothing like the lush coral mass tumbling along the walls of a Kentish castle.  I looked at the bouquet (it was a long elevator wait) and it looked back at me, and I blinked first.  And then I considered the environment, the ecosystem, if you will -  the industrial grey carpet and the landlord-cream walls and that weird smell of stale air full of chemicals - and I realized, No, no, this is right.  I hereby present polyester flowers in their natural habitat.