Saturday, Feb. 06, 2010

COMMENTARY

There’s no certainty of spring in naked ladies

All I can say is they’re up.

Most gardeners call them by their common names: surprise lilies, resurrection lilies, magic lilies or naked ladies.

Botanists call them Lycoris squamigera.

But I call them reckless — appearing as they did, on a recent frosty morning, thrusting up their first tender spears when there still were lingering patches of snow to be seen, and the thermometer registered an inhospitable 17 degrees.

They have an interesting cycle.

Their foliage, sprouting from bulbs, somewhat resembles that of jonquils, only coarser. They grow in dense, foot-high clumps, but after only a few weeks wither, yellow and disappear.

Then, usually in August, seemingly overnight (hence the descriptive terms “surprise” and “naked”), up comes an altogether barren stalk 2 feet or more tall, producing at its top a cluster of lovely, trumpet-shaped pink blossoms.

They’re supposed to show their first foliage in early spring, not in the dark season. It could be that, after our run of bitter weeks, a few hours of intermittent pale sunlight had deceived them.

If so, they were not alone in their confusion. That same day, in a shopping district, we saw a fellow — youngish, but surely old enough to know better — sauntering along the sidewalk in short pants and a T-shirt.

Now I’m as eager as anyone for winter’s end. But I’m cautious by nature.

I won’t believe spring’s almost at hand until I wake in the night to the music of northbound Canada geese, navigating by that old map written in the memory of their kind.

And I’ll not be certain it’s really here until red leaf buds the size of popcorn appear on the maple tree outside my window, and I get the annual call from my farm neighbor, reporting the first turkey gobble has been heard, the first bird-foot violet has put a sparkle of blue in the brown of frost-burned grass, and the first morel mushroom has been spied pushing up through leaf litter in the woods behind the cabin.

That’s when I’ll know that we’ve safely turned the corner from the nastiest winter in recent memory, and that there’ll be no more knife-edged blasts sent down our way from the Arctic region.

It’s solid evidence I want, not smoke and mirrors.

I’m not about to pin my hopes on the false promise of a crowd of naked ladies in our garden, enticing as that might sound.

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