THE DELPHINIUM

My love affair with the mixed blues, purples and lavenders of the glorious Delphinium (a royal member of the Buttercup family) began years ago when I’d pass by a fallow field on a ragged, old 2-lane highway.  There along the edge and in the ditch were thousands of Delphinium growing free-form, waving quietly in the breeze.  Each year for several years, the patch would grow and increase in volume, the edges expanding in glory.  There was no obvious rhyme, no pre-planned reason to the patch.  They were just there: seeding and re-seeding themselves and allowed to exist in all their mesmerizing beauty and the sight?  Took my breath away…

Then they put a strip mall there.

The Blues, Lavenders, and Purples

In measured backyard neighborhoods we grow some along the fence to support their grand height, but the eager Delphinium is never quite allowed to be everything it was created to be, to reach for its full potential.  It is placed among other flowers and plants where it is told to behave nicely, share the space and get along with others.  Neat borders and purposeful edging keep it from infringing freely into the wild open.  It is still beautiful, just oh-so-contained.

But I wouldn’t mind, someday, when I am too old to be expected to follow suburban-garden-protocol, to let the Delphinium be, to scatter the seed around my house and let it fall at season’s end only to sprout up in new places the next time.  I would not be opposed to waking early in late spring, curtains waving in the sunlit breeze, to take my coffee out to walk amidst a full field of Delphineum dancing to a morning melody.  It would not be neat, nor orderly, but it would be soft and sweet.  It would be as it should be and I?  I would take my place among the long stems of star-shaped blooms and disappear into the soft sway for most of the day.

I have the fever one gets come spring…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  2010~let the Delphiniums have more space!  Teach Sandy-the-Dog that crashing through them in a bird chase  is hereby unacceptable.

Google images…wish I could find what I used to see the strip mall now stands…