lapses

I.

Last week, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden held its annual cherry blossom festival.  Camera-wielding tourists from all over the world showed up.  My fellow Brooklynites, many of them decked out in elaborate costumes, showed up.  The Kanzan cherry blossom trees, the stars of the show, did not show up.

A long, harsh winter had pushed back their bloom time a week.   The weekend of the festival, their branches were merely smudged with light pink, like a thumb smeared with ink.  The show went on, nonetheless; it had to.   Because, as I discovered, the cherry blossom festival is only partially about the cherry blossoms.

I'd never been before, and I found it to be a curious pairing: the most elegant, restrained aspects of Japanese garden design paired with the most flamboyant representatives of pop culture - lurid pink and blue wigs, pigeon-toed poses in elaborate costumes, dance music, gaming champions.  On the main lawn, in between the double rows of cherry blossom trees, had been erected an enormous white tent.  

Part of me understood that the garden has to do what it can to attract wider interest - there can only be so many plant nerds! - but it was discouraging to see the rows of tents selling goods - like money-lenders in the temple, I thought - on the lawn.  How could you really appreciate the trees when half of them were hidden from sight?  The upshot is that if you missed the official festival but came this weekend, you had a far better show.

II. 

By yesterday, I knew that the trees would be in full bloom, and with fewer crowds, to boot, and as I came down the stairs I could see, peaking over the lilacs, the Kanzan cherry trees, like some pink-burning fire.

There is nothing at all subtle about the Kanzan cherry tree - not its stubby, squat trunk; nor its fat bouquets of flowers; nor its color, which I would like to call a deep, sultry mauve, but which might more accurately be termed Barbie Doll Pink.  And yet, when I see the tree in bloom, I always remember that subtlety is overrated.  Subtlety does not give you the sheer drunken joy that we all seem to feel in the presence of a cherry blossom tree in bloom.  It may be one of the last contemporary urges of the animist tree worship that many cultures once shared - and while we may no longer feel reverential in the grand presence of an oak, the pretty, the sweet, the joyous still touches us.  

When I was a child, my friend M. lived just next door to my grandmother.  In her front yard there was a large Kanzan cherry that we used to climb (as we did many trees, actually: it was the best kind of childhood) when it was in flower.  So thick were the flowers, we were convinced that passing cars could not see us.

II. the modern affliction

We are currently afflicted by a vogue for the visual.  By this I do not mean to insult my photographer friends, all of whom are immensely talented, and one of whom once explained her art and her passion by saying that her camera focused her eye, slowed her sight so that she could actually see.  But most of us, myself included, have no particular eye for the art at all, and we photograph not see but to capture: it's less about the image inherent than it is about showing others that we were there, we saw it, we did it, we looked damn good doing it.  Most of us have no artistry, but we do have the tools - fancy cameras and iphones and ipads and easy-to-use filters - and an aggressive desire to get the picture at all costs.

...At a cost to the garden, that is.  I have often found myself wondering, these past couple of weeks in the garden, at my fellow garden-goers as they trample on flowers to get the photographs that they want.  In the tulip beds edging the lotus ponds, and which were at their peak last week, the entire first row of plants was crushed underfoot.  I watched as people stood on the delicate Tulipa clusiana 'Cynthia,' which appeared to have been painted with a rigger brush, to get a closer shot of the brilliant tulip 'Orange Princess.'  The unfortunate Cynthia was crushed underfoot - like a serf, I thought, and how appropriate in this age of Piketty and royal worship.  Today, I watched a woman casually stamp through the blue hyacinths so that she could better photograph the lilacs, and I have seen parent after parent plop their children into the middle of flowerbeds, to take photographs for grandparents or Christmas cards.  I wonder 1) who is actually going to look at all of these thousands and thousands of photographs that we all produce, and 2) why so few of the photographers seem to see, or care, what is just outside their lens.  "Do you think that we saw differently before everyone had a camera?" I asked R. the other day.  "The larger context as well as the detail?  Do you think that we'd see things differently if we could only be guaranteed of having an image if we ourselves took the time to really look at it and draw or paint it?"  "Well, that's what Ruskin thought," R. responded.  She does listen to an awful lot of my whining.

III.

Every week there has been something new to see.  First came the great splashes of yellow daffodils, witch hazel and forsythia, and then scented white and pink magnolias, and last week, the pony-snouted Narcissus Triandrus 'Thalia.'  By now the daffodils, scattered across the hill, have curdled, and the forsythias returned to green anonymity, and the saucer magnolias are as crispy as something out of the deep-fryer.  Half of the tulips are debauched, splayed, collapsed in dissipation against one another.  In a week the cherry blossoms will be muddied with the greenish-brown of their leaves.  Right now the sweet and spicy (and underrated) viburnum 'Judd' will lure you from ten feet away, and the pansies are showing their small, whiskered faces.

Soon enough my favorite cut flower, the peony, will bloom.  Already the fennel-leafed peonies are in flower and heaped with pollen, like feast platters for bees.  A visit to the peony beds found that the common names mostly adhered to five main categories: desserts, people, possible Revlon ads, Golden Age movies that were or could have been, and, strangely, war.  So there was 'Pink Parfait,' 'Chiffon Parfait,' 'Dinner Plate,' 'Pink Lemonade,' 'Sorbet', 'Bowl of Cream,' and the awkwardly-named 'Chocolate Soldier'; and 'Elsa Sass,' 'Mrs. A.M. Brand,' and 'Mr. Baldo'; and 'Coral Charm,' 'Spellbinder,' 'Enticing,' and 'Do Tell'; and 'Moon River', 'Pillow Talk', 'Madame Butterfly,' 'Miss America,' 'Laddie,' and 'Tinkerbell'; and 'Commando,' 'Convoy,' and 'Early Scout.'

I absolutely cannot wait.

IV.

 Last weekend they were still merely misted with pink and tinged with blue, but as this weekend turned the lilacs came into display.  

When "we" complain that contemporary culture overemphasizes the visual, generally we make the comparison to the neglected verbal: the epistle reduced to the three paragraph email, whittled down to the status update, truncated to the text - and then replaced entirely by emoticons and instagram images.  But scent - in gardening, scent has been so horribly shortchanged by plant breeders in favor of bigger flowers or repeat blooms, and we now raise flowers to our noses and bend over to smell branches not, often, because there is anything left to smell, but because of some ancient cultural memory, the original context of which is long gone.  It is a reflex, like raising a toast or singing Auld Lang Syne.

But to walk among the lilacs at the BBG, many of which date back more than a half-century, is to be reminded how integral fragrance once was to the ideal of a plant.  Lilacs like 'Evangeline' and 'Blanche Sweet' are old-fashioned both for their names and their sirenic scents, and while I stood among the lilacs, I hoped that the value of this other, neglected sense, might be resurrected along with a new generation of Abigails and Maxs, Theos and Evelyns.

- "Why not say 'lilacs'?" the elderly woman next to me demanded, pointing at the sign.  "'Syringa vulgaris'!  "It is a lilac," I reassured her.  "'Syringa vulgaris' is just the Latin name.  But it's a lilac."  "It is lilacs!" she shouted triumphantly, turning to her granddaughter, and they both then permitted themselves to inhale deeply, prompting me, in turn, to wonder if a lilac by any other name really would smell as sweet.