Wildflower Wednesday

I just finished reading 'The Lost Garden' by Helen Humphreys and may I say that if you are feeling overwhelmingly cheerful and need a heavy scattering of black cloud - run to the library or book store.   It was the story that drew me in - a horticulturist from the Royal Horticultural Society who has signed on to turn an estate garden into a war-time potato factory with a bunch of Land Girls.   She arrives late by a week to her new position then names her helpers after varieties of potatoes because they aren't nice to her.

During her gardening adventures she finds a Lost Garden and starts to root around there all day, leaving the Potato Girls to potato away.  The old garden has 3 sections, Longing, Loss, and something else and she really isn't able to figure it out.  Several of the major characters die, in or because of the war, documented in one breezy paragraph, sort of the way you might say, milk gone, oranges ok, need bread.   The handsome captain she lusts after in that sort of TAKE ME NOW fashion spends most of his time reading poetry and being well built, groomed and handsome.  He used to have a best friend (now dead, surprise!) who he shared a bare chested ride with on the Toronto ferry.  So sadly she appears to have been the only one not following the clues in the previous chapters and was completely gobsmacked to learn that the crush of her life is gay.  There was also a Canadian soldier who knit sweaters, but wasn't gay, but I think that was a device just to try to throw us off.  Fortunately, it was a very short book, and it ended like this:

"The thing about gardens is that everyone thinks they go on growing, that in winter they sleep and in spring they rise.  But it's more that they die and return, die and return.  They lose themselves.  They haunt themselves." Followed by:  "Every story is about death....."

It just makes my head hurt thinking of my plants being dead and losing themselves, haunting themselves, so I'm going to just pretend that they're all just asleep waiting for warmer weather which must be coming soon.  So I've taken the liberty of grabbing photos from other years to show you the wildflowers that I'll have in my garden next month to show you.

 Hepatica soaking wet:

Hepatica at its prettiest:

 Sanguinaria candensis  

A few weeks later:

 Very pretty leaves after the flowers are done:

 Dicentra culcullaria - shivering in the rain and in flower above.  Below my favourite Mertensia virginica:

May it continue its beauty sleep until it's ready to delight me.

For more wonderful wildflowers from around the world visit Gail at http://www.clayandlimestone.com.