Birthday Flowers

I've written before in my newsletter and my blog about the concept of Birthday Flowers, that is a flower that blooms on your birthday. My mother associated the Amaryllis Belladonna with my birthday because it blooms in Southern California where I was born on September 4, my birthday. It's also called Naked Lady and there's another flower called Naked Lady, the autumn crocus, which blooms in Seattle, where I live now, on my birthday.

This year I was worried as my birthday approached because I didn't see any sign of my birthday flowers where they usually bloom, in the parkway of a residential street near my work. Then on the day before my birthday, my daughter invited me to go on a long ramble with her through the nearby park. On our way home we spotted some of my birthday flowers emerging from a patch of dirt outside a brick apartment building only a block from our house. It's not a block I usually travel, either when walking the dog or on my way to work or the store or the library. In fact, I'm only on that block when the lindens are in bloom. So it was a nice find. It's one of the great things about being a naturalist in the city, that you can discover something brand new right around the corner.

On the day after my birthday I was on my way to work, traveling along my usual path, and there were my birthday flowers in their usual spot. I don't know how I missed them on my previous trips. I'm not sure how I feel about having the autumn crocus as my birthday flower. It's highly poisonous but also poignant, appearing in the midst of a blighted landscape as a pale apparition of vulnerable beauty.

Do you have a birthday flower?

Fragrant Rhododendrons

Ever since I read the book Tales of the Rose Tree by Jane Brown and learned that the earliest rhododendrons, brought to England from Nepal and China by plant explorers, were fragrant, I’ve been searching for a fragrant rhododendron. Seattle is rhododendron city; there’s a rhodie on every block, practically every yard. It’s our state flower after all. But, despite sniffing every rhodendron I passed, I couldn’t find one with any scent. That’s partly because, as with other highly hybridized flowers, the scent has been bred out of them in favor of big blossoms and vivid colors.

Then on May 1, when I was leaving the Museum of History and Industry after a great reunion of Nearby History participants, I smelled the most intoxicating fragrance. I looked around and the only blossoms in sight were on a huge rhododendron with large white flowers. So I thought I would try sniffing the blossoms. Ah! A heavenly aroma. A truly fragrant rhododendron.

A few days later, I was celebrating an impromptu May ceremony with some friends, tossing wreaths into the lagoons at the end of the Arboretum, when I saw another white rhododendron, right next to the gatehouse that leads into Broadmoor. I pointed it out and we went over to smell it. Again, that intoxicating fragrance, a lot like honeysuckle. We stuck our noses deep into the blossoms to inhale the scent and when we raised our heads, there were smudges of pollen on our noses and sticky pistils. The flower had lured us, hapless pollinators, to spread its seed around. A perfect ending for May Day.

The photograph above is not either of the bushes described but it may be the same cultivar. This is Polar Bear and it’s a fragrant rhododendron offered for sale by Banwy Valley Nursery in the UK.

The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery has a wonderful list of fragrant rhododendron cultivars.

I was especially fascinated by the distinctions made in describing their scents. Bill Massey is very fragrant with cinnamon/chocolate overtones. Fragrantissimum smells of honeysuckle and nutmeg. And Fragrantissimum Improved has “an almost tropical fragrance with nuances of jasmine and cloves.” McNabbi smells like nutmeg and Mi Amor has hints of musk and tarragon. Paul Molinari has the scent of wild honeysuckle (I have a feeling this is the cultivar I enjoyed) while Scott’s Valentine smells like jasmine. It’s enough to make me run out and buy some rhododendrons for my garden.

One thing this flower project is doing for me is making me fall in love with flowers I always disdained (like the bergenia and the big showy, scentless rhodies).

Birthday Flowers

I've been championing the idea of a birthday flower, that is a flower that blossoms on your birthday. And here's the most recent picture of mine: the naked lady or autumn crocus.

These grow in the parkway a few blocks from my house. I love how they mysteriously appear and just as mysteriously disappear. I wanted to pick one but I know they are poisonous so I didn't (although I think maybe only the bulb is poisonous).

Linnaeus named the autumn crocus, colchicum, after Colchis, the island on which the poisoner and sorceress Medea lived. It has even more wonderful common names. I know it as a naked lady. It's a naked maiden in Germany (because it has no leaves, just a bare flower stalk). In France, they are called dog-killers and bare-bottoms. In England, Wilfrid Blunt (who gives this delightful list) mentions the names: upstarts, daggers, kite’s legs, naked boys and naked nannies. While the Arabs call them, he says, the lamps of the ghoul. That's my favorite. Do they look like the lamps of the ghoul? Maybe a little.

Autumn Crocus Revisited

Here they are two days later.

I'll check again on my birthday.