Poppies

It is sometime after ten in the morning. I’m not wearing a watch, so don’t know the exact time, which suits me just fine, sitting at a late breakfast table on the deck in front of the house, the place I have come to fondly call my 'bower'. It’s a lovely word, isn’t it, so often used in the poems of the more romantic times of the 18^th and 19^th century. It expresses perfectly the summer peace I find here.

The little waterfall in the rock garden behind me is singing its soothing song, the bees are humming in the poppies to my right, and still the canola from the neighbour’s field across the road spreads it golden scent, heavy with honey.

These poppies are a pure delight! On the left side of the bed the Oriental Poppies with their ruffled crimson double blossoms have taken residence, while more to the right, towards the pond, is a thick stand of my favourites. Here, single blossoms sway gently in the breeze, in more shades of pink than I would have thought possible: almost-white to salmon coloured, passionate fuchsia to soft pastel, often edged in white. In the morning sunlight, delicate petals cast shadows on the next layer, the fringed, bristly little hub at its centre topped with a whitish ridged cap. No wonder that, in my childhood, we transformed these blossoms, or rather those of their wild cousins growing in fields of rye and barley, into little dolls with ruffled dresses, smoothing back the petals to make ballerina skirts. 

The other day I dead-headed the poppies, a task both necessary (to prevent the delight from being turned into dread: so quickly the tiny seeds can spread over the whole garden) and daunting because there were so many. I took my time, had my little ‘poppy meditation’, searching for yet another plump seed capsule that had escaped my searching eye. On each beheaded stem glistened a drop of yellowish sap, sealing off the wound, and the unmistakable scent of poppies enveloped me – that, too, rising from the depths of my childhood memory. 

‘Drows’d with the fume of poppies ...’ – this line from Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ suddenly took on real meaning. How different it is to read something – quite sure of its meaning – and to experience it with our body, our senses, to truly know it all of a sudden.

The sun has traveled around and now lingers on my face: time to pack up and head for the garden, a paradise not only filled with flowers and ripening vegetables, but unfortunately still with too many weeds as well, side effects of yet another wet summer. 

The beauty of graveyards

 

My favourite book store

A bit hesitatingly, it seems, the bell from St. Mary’s Catholic Church across the street counts out the four beats announcing the full hour, then seven more, and immediately launches into its bright and clear morning chime. It lasts but a few minutes before it dims and stops altogether. The deeper, more measured voice of old St. Kilian, one of the two big Gothic churches in the historic centre of town, sounds a bit longer before it, too, fades and gives way to the early morning sounds of a town in the twenty-first century. 

Once again I am in Korbach in Northern Hesse for a visit, and for the last week-and-a-half I have enjoyed the beautiful early summer landscape. Germany had to endure a long, harsh winter this year, followed by a dismally wet spring that culminated in flooding in large areas of Southern and Eastern Germany just before I arrived. Reports of the terrible devastation found their way even into Canadian news, and of course it was even more prominent here. Only in the last few days the people along the Elbe River, too, can breathe a bit easier since the flood wave has crested and the water is finally receding, leaving behind a huge mess and likely years of clean-up and rebuilding. 

Nothing of this has touched the area where I am now. Here, all that’s evident from the long weeks of rainfall is the lush, though compared to other years somewhat delayed vegetation. I was delighted to find groups of tall purple, white-tipped spikes of lupines along highways and picturesque narrow winding country roads, the yellow blaze of gore on drier hillsides, the first red splashes of poppies in barley fields, royal blue cornflowers, shiny yellow cock’s foot and graceful stands of daisies: all the ingredients of childhood bouquets, just as precious as they were then. I am amazed how, one after the other, the names of wildflowers come back to me. Even more, however, I am amazed at the variety, and even here, within the confines of the city, I find them in many little corners.

When I walk into the centre of town I especially love to follow the path through the old graveyards, situated between the remnants of the two parallel walls once protecting the city. Here, though lawns are cut and the most unruly growth is trimmed back from time to time, things grow more or less according to Mother Nature’s menu rather than the careful planning of a human gardener. In the last few years efforts have been made to restore some of the headstones to make the inscription legible again. Some of these graves date back into the early 18^th century, the inscriptions on the stones showing not only names and dates of birth and death, but also profession or social standing. One of them, dedicated to a devoted mother by her loving son, also reveals that he lives in Paris and is the recipient of the ‘Big and Small Order of Honour’, rewards for excellence in one or the other military campaign. Others bear witness to the deep faith of the family with bible verses or reference to the brevity and fleeting nature of life on earth and the glory of resurrection. Moss and algae thrive in the humid climate, however, and soon will start to reclaim their territory. 

These graveyards are integrated into the system of walkways, and I much prefer to take this route than the parallel one on a sidewalk beside a road with heavy traffic hugging the outer city wall. The instance I step through the small gate I feel I have set foot in a sanctuary, and the hustle and bustle I had been part of a moment earlier miraculously fall away. Suddenly bird song is all around me: finches, robins, red-tails, chickadees and many others are part of this choir, unperturbed by what goes on beyond the walls.

It is hot now, temperatures in the thirties, and even at night it doesn’t cool down the way it does at home. Fog, having crept in overnight, is starting to lift, the promise of another beautiful summer day.    

Mud, blossoms and mosquitoes

 It is late afternoon. The incessant call of the frog has been drifting up from the pond in front of the house all afternoon. I say ‘the frog’ as if I knew this frog personally, but while its voice has become very familiar by now I have not yet seen this furtive guest. Even though I have squatted by the side of the pond more than once, keeping as still as I could so as not to alarm it, my peering into the murky waters has netted no result. Let’s just say the voice sounds the same as it did last year, and every time I heard it this year, and since there is always but one voice I imagine it is always the same frog. 

Last night it occurred to me that it might not be a frog at all, but a toad. We have found toads here before, though not in the last few years. Thinking its call might give a clue to its identity I looked up ‘frog and toad calls in western Canada’ on the internet last night, but ended up being more confused than when I started. There are so many different calls, and it seems impossible to me to determine the identity of the pond dweller this way. It doesn’t really matter: it is just nice to listen to this song that sounds with renewed vigour after every rain. 

Things have changed tremendously since I wrote last. Then, I wondered half-jokingly if we would get one more snowfall in April. I should have known that this was no joking matter: after a nice week during which much of the old snow melted April 29^th brought us 20 cm of new snow to replenish what had been lost. Gravel roads, just dried and firmed up, once again became soft and difficult to manoeuvre, and we were now getting really anxious about the start of field work. 

Yet this country has the potential to surprise us, even after farming here for more than thirty years: by the end of that week, on the first weekend in May, we enjoyed daytime temperatures of +30 Celsius. That might well turn out to be the hottest day of the summer; not every year does the mercury climb that high. The night following this record breaker it dipped to barely above the freezing mark – stark reminder that we live in a place of extremes. 

It stayed nice and dry, thankfully, and since Magnus and Courtney, who live 40 kilometres northwest from here, had been spared the bulk of the last snowfall we were able to start field work there on the following Friday, May 10^th.

A few days later it was time to move closer to home, where it had dried up somewhat in the meantime. Conditions were far from ideal when we started applying fertilizer on the first field: areas close to the treed border were still wet, and water was standing in the low areas. Yet there was no time to wait anymore: canola and wheat needed to go in the ground if they were to reach maturity in time for harvest. 

As always in a wet spring it was a balancing act between getting as close as possible to the wet spots and avoiding to get stuck. That first evening,  possibly a bit careless after driving all day without getting into trouble, I misjudged and suddenly found the wheels of the tractor spinning in the mud. Unable to get out on my own I had to wait for the other four-wheel drive tractor to pull me out.

 

After this somewhat frustrating beginning things improved considerably, and we made good progress. All around us the world had burst into spring mode. White poplars were the first to leaf out, a slight hint of green at first, those few wonderful days of anticipation before the leaves unfold fully and it seems impossible that there could have been nothing but bare branches and long unsightly tufts of bleached, dry grass for months. 

It is such a nice time to be driving tractor! The greening hills in the distance, the foamy white blossoms of chokecherries and saskatoons along the hedgerows, the still water in the low areas reflecting clouds and the afterglow of yet another magnificent sunset, and leisure to watch this all day – all this certainly is ample reward for long days, fatigue and a sore back. 

Cabbage White feeding on chokecherry blossoms

And now all this, too, is past. A flock of waxwings gathered in the cherry tree in front of the kitchen window yesterday and eagerly ripped off petals, setting off a shower of white drifting to the ground, a lacy carpet that soon will turn brown. Now the lilac hedge is almost in full bloom, and Swallowtails dance from one nectar-laden cluster to the next, their pale yellow wings with their delicate black, blue and red pattern rarely ever totally still. 

We finished seeding last Friday, two weeks after we had started, just minutes before it started to rain. Strangely enough, the rain was already welcome: days of strong wind had dried out the top layer of soil, and this would ensure proper germination. 

Rain showers and thunderstorms have been part of every day ever since. Looking up from my place at the desk, now, half an hour after sunset, I count eighteen mosquitoes glued to the outside of the fly screen, longing to enter my room and, likely, sink their stingers into my skin to still their thirst for blood. No such luck! It’s enough that I have to contend with them when I am in the garden. My home, I inform them, is my castle – NO ENTRY FOR MOSQUITOES!