I know no flower that is more fascinating, when it first appears, than the blue grape-hyacinth. And yet, because it lasts so long, and keeps on coming so repeatedly, for at least two months, one tends later on to ignore it, even to despise it a little. Yet that is very unjust.
The first grape-hyacinths are towers of blue, thick and rich and meaningful, above the unrenewed grass. The upper buds are pure blue, shut tight; round balls of pure, perfect warm blue, blue, blue; while the lower bells are darkish blue-purple, with the spark of white at the mouth. As yet, none of the lower bells has withered, to leave the greenish, separate sparseness of fruiting that spoils the grape hyacinth later on, and makes it seem naked and functional. All hyacinths are like that, in their seeding.
But at first, you have only a compact tower of night-blue clearing to dawn, and extremely beautiful. If we were tiny as fairies, and lived only a summer, how lovely these great trees of bells would be to us, towers of night and dawn-bule globes. They would rise above us thick and succulent, and the purple globes would push the blue ones up, with white sparks of nipples, and we should see a god in them.
As a matter of fact, someone once told me they were the flowers of the many-breasted Artemis; and it is true, the Cybele of Ephesus, with her clustered breasts, was like a grape-hyacinth at the bosom.
This is the time, in March, when the sloe is white and misty in the hedge-tangle by the stream, and on the slope of land the peach tree stands pink and alone. The almond blossom, silvery pink, is passing, but the peach, deep-toned, bluey, not at all ethereal, this reveals itself like flesh, and the trees are like isolated individuals: the peach and the apricot.
A man said this spring: “Oh, I don’t care for peach blossom!It is such a vulgar pink!” One wonders what anybody means by a “vulgar” pink. I think pink flannelette is rather vulgar. But probably it’s the flannelette’s fault, not the pink. And peach-blossom has a beautiful sensual pink, far from vulgar, most rare and private. And pink is so beautiful in a landscape: pink houses, pink almond, pink peach and purply apricot, pink asphodels. It is so conspicuous and so individual, that pink among the coming green of spring.
Because the first flowers that emerge from winter seem always white or yellow or purple. Now the celandines are out, and along the edges of the podere, the big, sturdy, black-purple anemones, with black hearts.
