Flowers they fade

Three years ago, a packet of Californian poppy seeds, tipped nonchalantly into my flowerbed, yielded a passable crop of quite ordinary (dare I say, boring) plain cream and yellow flowers.

However, it turned out that the packet had included a flamboyant intruder – an Oriental, its deep purple heart surrounded by scarlet petals with frilly edges. There was just one bloom, and when it died I shook out the seeds from the pod, kept them in a brown envelope over the winter and sowed them the following year. Nothing happened. By the year after, I’d forgotten them, thinking they were dead.

This year – surprise! One oriental poppy sprang up from the earth. It flowered, again and again, each bloom staying no more than two days before the petals fell. It seemed a waste of such beauty, to last so short a time.

But it made me think of a poem by D.H. Lawrence, called ‘Fidelity’, contrasting flowers and gemstones. Of flowers he says:

O flowers they fade because they are moving swiftly;
a little torrent of life
leaps up to the summit of the stem, gleams,
turns over round the bend
of the parabola of curved flight,
sinks, and is gone, like a comet curving into the invisible.

O flowers, they are all the time travelling
like comets, and they come into our ken
for a day, for two days, and withdraw, slowly vanish again.

And we, we must take them on the wing, and let them go.

He might easily have been talking about my Oriental poppies. There really is a parabolic curve in the stem, where it bends over and ends in a hanging bud. Then the ‘torrent of life’ bursts into a spectacular flash of red. 36 hours later it’s just a naked seed pod, looking embarrassed to be on show, while the frilly-edged petals lie on the ground like feathers from a firebird.

I was lucky enough to catch sight of a shooting star in the Perseid meteor shower earlier this month. It had zigzagged across the eastern sky and disappeared in a split second. A comet, of the sort that D.H. Lawrence mentions, might be visible in the sky for a few weeks, even though it is actually travelling at great speed.

He’s right, though – we can’t hold on to a flower for ever. Its fleeting nature is part of its beauty, its essence as a flower. A photo can’t match the reality, and when winter comes and the flowerbed is bare, its brilliance will be almost unimaginable.

For this year, I must ‘take it on the wing, and let it go’. But you can be sure I’ll have kept plenty of seeds in a brown paper envelope.