Spring smile
A holiday Turnstone (3 minute read)
I love the long days of summer, but for me, spring is the most magical season. For most of my life I’ve found winter a real struggle. I don’t like the cold, and the short days often make me feel as if everything is closing in around me. By the end of July, though, I have noticed the days getting longer, and I’m anticipating the warmer weather. Wellington’s spring weather is not the finest – it’s when we have our wildest winds, veering from bruising nor-westers to biting southerlies. But I still enjoy spring more than winter.
Wherever I have lived, the flowers have always been one of spring’s joys. Daffodils are my favourite. They are a smile on a stalk, especially the ones with big, yellow trumpets. I can’t look at one without feeling cheered. In my garden, I try to leave them be, because they last longer in the ground than in a vase. Sometimes, though, the weather beats them up and I bring them inside.
Tulips are more difficult to grow here, so I don’t have many in my garden. But I love the public displays. The Wellington Botanic Garden has lovely tulip beds in late spring, and most of my tulip photos are from there, although one comes from late spring in Helsinki. My favourite tulip is the one with red petals tipped in yellow.
My love of tulips and daffodils is at odds with much of my appreciation of nature, because they are both rather unnatural flowers. Wild relatives of the cultivated daffodil are mainly Mediterranean, while the wild relatives of tulip are found in Europe, North Africa and right across Asia to China. But for hundreds of years, people have been crossing different kinds of tulip or daffodil until the origin and parentage of the cultivated plants is unclear1. There are few flowers I can think of which have been more over-bred, with the possible exception of roses and maybe some of the orchids.
I love them anyway. I can smile at the strange, inconspicuous flowers of Coprosma, and also at a daffodil’s showy trumpets. I can delight in the diversity of New Zealand’s rainforests, where the tall trees are festooned with vines, ferns and mosses in every shade of green, and still delight in a massed planting of a single tulip variety.
Part of appreciating plants is appreciating their natural rhythms. Daffodils and tulips are brightness and joy after the cold and dark of winter. They can be manipulated into flowering a little earlier, but they are still one of nature’s ephemeral gifts, like a pōhutukawa at Christmas. In my garden, all that is left now are shrivelled leaves and buried bulbs. For me, and for my southern hemisphere readers, the flowers are gone until next year. For my northern hemisphere readers, though, they are still to come. Perhaps in the warmer areas they are well on their way, with their leaves already above the ground. In colder areas, they are still snug beneath the earth. But they will emerge soon.
So much is uncertain right now. Many of us are approaching 2025 in much the same way we would open the lid of a container which was forgotten at the back of the fridge. The rhythms of nature themselves are under threat as seasons shift in response to climate change. But the daffodils and tulips are still coming. They will still bring joy to my heart, whatever else we face.
Not with each other, though, because they are not at all closely related.