Scent of spring

[muckefuck]

Sunday, as we loafed around the house and monshu and I chatted about many things, talk turned to flowers. The narcissus in the sunroom are going great guns, flooding the nook with fragrance; the batch in the dim dining room, not so much. So the Old Man retired the second batch and brought in a budding hyacinth which I immediately nicknamed "Pinky". He responded by denying the pinkness of the buds, but now the his error of judgment is clear for all to see.

The "paper whites", as he calls them, hold a special place in his memories because they were always the first flowers to emerge around the house where he grew up. "You don't have snowdrops where you lived?" I asked, puzzled. Apparently not. But they did have "naked ladies", a spring flower I'd never heard of before. He explained the name by describing how the flower stalks come up first, and only after the blooms have faded do the long slender leaves poke out.

"Are they pink?" I asked. "Yes, and very fragrant. If you had a clump of five or six of them, you'd smell the perfume fifty feet away." "Surprise lilies!" I said. I don't remember the fragrance, but I remember surprise lilies. We had a healthy patch of them in the back yard of the house in Troy. But they didn't bloom in the spring; they were definitely a summer flower. So were monshu's a different variety or did they simply respond differently to the very different climate of southern California?

Comments

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

We never had snowdrops (Bay Area, northern California), but crocuses were usually the first flower, followed by daffodils.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a reverse surprise lily. With surprise lilies, I remember the leaves would come out first, and then die back. Then a stalk suddenly appears and the flowers bloom -- it's in the summer, I think.

But no telling what weird plants they have in California. They could certainly have one with flowers first and then leaves.