The Gardener's Friend — On Anemones
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Anemone — Lopez Island, Washington, 2016
For some blooms, it is only after seeing them in-person that they express themselves to you. Anemone is one of those flowers.
Growing up in Florida, anemones were a thing of winsome flower tableaus in magazines. Later on, maybe I saw one tucked into a wedding bouquet or two, but it was in Los Angeles that I had a private audience with a single anemone bloom.
You always remember these first floral encounters. The light was low, that kind Alice of Wonderland called a golden afternoon. The flower seemed to exist without a vase. Certainly, there was one, but all I remember was the soft white of the anemone's petals and its center, velvety black-blue.
This was not a grocery store flower. It was the kind of bloom that made me wonder what other strange beauty Nature had to share. I never did ask my friend where she found the single bloom or who gave it to her. After all, there were more new blooms to see in California. Pomegranate flowers, poppies, salvia, fuschia. I forgot about the anemone.
Then, in 2016, I went to Lopez Island, a tranquil haven off the coast of Washington State. While I stayed on the island, I documented the flora and fauna. I also met local people at the morning Saturday market, including flower farmer, Lindsey Cummins.
Lindsey graciously invited me back to Dancing Flower Farm, the tiny plot of land she had carved out on her family's property, and where she lived in a bus that she and her partner had converted into a cozy home. Until meeting Lindsey, I had only seen one anemone, but I as rounded the gate to enter the garden, I saw a rainbow of them all twisted and curled, flashing their vibrant petals at me. I felt joy.
History suggests flowers and emotions have always been entwined. In Greek myth, the culture from which anemone gets its name, the flower sprung up from the tears of Aphrodite while mourning the loss of her lover, Adonis. There is something hopeful and enduring in this fiction. We continue to act out her gesture in Western culture by offering flowers to people after they lose loved ones. Other fictions abound: There’s an old wive’s tale that suggests that anemones close when it rains, or that it can ward off disease. None speak to me across time the way the story of Aphrodite does though.
Most people associate anemones with spring, but there is also a variety that blooms in autumn: Anemone japonica. Notorious plant explorer Robert Fortune first introduced Anemone japonica to England in 1844 after finding it in Shanghai, where I now call home. I have yet to see the flower in the wilds of the city, but I’ll keep looking. Maybe all that’s needed are tears. — GF