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The air these days is luminous. We wake to a grey sky and a drizzle that lasts the day, but the following day is sunlight from the start. Dark-glasses weather, it's so bright. Scrubbed clean, everything revealed, the city faces spring with a bright face.
Walking this morning I saw golden yellow wherever I looked. Tulips, some normal, and some in that attenuated shape that we plant because we get bored with normal. Daffodils (or are they narcissi? Or jonquils?), so bright and crisp they look artificial, fill the tiny front yards along the sidewalk. Just as you can divide dessert-lovers into chocolate people and caramel people, spring gardeners are either tulip people or daffodil people. I'm a tulip person, myself.
"And what about forsythia?" cries someone from the peanut gallery. "You haven't mentioned forsythia!" It's coming, you know. Soon huge roiling bushes of it will fill the corners of yards (the corner where the lot meets the sidewalk, or the house meets the porch, or the side of the house meets the front). We plant forsythia to brighten our corners.
May I rant for a moment? About one-fifth of the owners of forsythia bushes seem to be forsythia-phobes. Have you noticed this? The forsythia is a wild thing. Like a pre-Raphaelite beauty, its glory is its hair, the golden locks that flow and extend the line of the bush. When I think of the most beautiful forsythia I've ever seen, I remember a very large bush whose branches, each strung with golden-yellow butterfly gems, floated into space from the base of the bush. The arc of the strand soared from the base to the farthest tip, each slim golden branch swooping off in a different direction. The graceful flowing strands of the bush swayed with the slightest breeze. A forsythia bush is like the long, disheveled locks of a lover after a lazy afternoon in bed.
That's a forsythia.
Now, have you seen the forsythias owned by forsythia-phobes? Sure, you have. Some mad pruner has given the bush a crew cut, obliterating the grace. This is the military model of the forsythia. Stems have been trimmed into a rigid hedge-shape, and the charming flowers struggle in vain to remind you what they could be if the branches were allowed to grow into their natural shape.
These bushes still go by the name "forsythia," but they are stunted, deformed, and the antithesis of the lovely forsythia. I have even seen forsythia bushes trained as standards—that is, trained to have an actual central trunk with flowering branches—neatly pruned, of course—at the top. An abomination.
Well, here's to the arrival of spring—and to naturally flowing forsythia bushes!
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