Beauty of spring in January (1/26/04)

“How do you get them to grow like that?” asked the pretty blond girl who delivered that mid-winter delight known as Girl Scout cookies.

She was referring to the shelf covered with bulbs growing in aptly-named hyacinth glasses. The long white roots curl around the bowls of the vase-shaped containers. The purplish bulbs sit just above the water level and thick green leaves cradle the deep purple hyacinths that are just beginning to open.

I took one off the shelf and let her smell the delicious fragrance. I explained that the bulbs had received a bit of artificial winter inside the refrigerator before being coaxed to bloom in the wrong season. She wanted to know if I then planted the bulbs outside. I told her that I did put them in the ground but that forcing them to bloom at the wrong time tended to confuse them and that they usually died.

I have hyacinths in various stages of bloom and impending bloom. I don’t know what colors some of them will be as my husband bought most of them for me for Christmas. They remind me of spring with their intense colors and aromas.

These magnificent members of the Liliaceae family also make me think of my mother-in-law. The first time she saw that I had hyacinths in bloom in winter she told me that they reminded her of her mother. It seems her mother always had rows of the flowers on her windowsills in January and February.

It seems odd that a flower with such a morbid mythological beginning should spark such pleasure. According to several versions of the story, Hyacinth was a beautiful boy whom the sun god Apollo loved. It seems that one of the other gods, Zephyr, a wind god, was jealous of this friendship.

One day when Apollo and Hyacinth were playing a game with some sort of discus (a forerunner to the Frisbee???) Zephyr caused the discus to bounce off a rock and smash Hyacinth in the head, killing him. A flower then sprang from Hyacinth’s wound. The letter-like markings on the petals of wild hyacinths are supposed to represent a mournful wail. Because of these supposed markings they were used in Greek funeral services. I guess they don’t have corresponding English markings as I have never seen hyacinths at any funeral I’ve ever been to.

Personally, I wouldn’t know one Greek letter from another even if I could find a wild hyacinth to check out this aspect of the story. As for flowers growing out of a wound caused by a jealous god … let’s just say that is something I have yet to experience.

I have mixed feelings about forcing bulbs to bloom at the wrong times. On one hand, I absolutely love watching the plants go from ugly brown or purple bulbs, to bright green leaves reaching out, and eventually to creations that fill the room with the heady fragrance of spring as the flowers reach their peak. For me, it is like watching hope blossom right in front of me.

On the other hand, I feel uneasy about forcing a process that I know will bring probable death to something so lovely. Flowers may not speak or run around but they are alive. Some part of me believes that they have as much right to life as anything else.

This doesn’t stop me from having several hyacinth glasses stuck on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator every fall in hopes of mid-winter blooms.

I have not passed this tradition on to my daughter. She thinks the fragrance is very unappealing. I believe the statement was, “They stink.” My mother agrees with her. Gracie, the cat, doesn’t care one way or another. The only flowers Gracie likes are carnations which she believes I purchase expressly for her to nibble on. As long as she leaves the hyacinths alone we are both happy and the house can smell like spring in winter.[[In-content Ad]]