There’s something a little fussy and old-fashioned about phlox. The flowers, arranged like over-sized five-leaf clovers, mass into airy clusters that give off a sweet, slightly musty aroma. My phlox paniculata were already well-entrenched in our long border when we bought our place almost thirty years ago, though I didn’t pay much attention to them at the time. I still don’t for most of the summer. With the peonies and lilies in riotous blossom, it’s easy to overlook the lanky plants standing quietly in the back of the border. Until, usually around mid-July, I notice that they’re sprinkled with powdery mildew – a white talcum-like substance that causes the leaves to wilt and brown. Every year I vow to dig them up in the fall. Then August rolls around. The roses and clematis and the daisies and astilbes have withered. But the phlox! The phlox are in wild, luxurious bloom – shaken from their long slumber to splash the fading border with great swaths of magenta. Dowdy no more, they flirt between the sedum and hydrangeas, belles of the late summer ball where they’ve danced for who knows how many decades.
The Gardener
by Patricia Hooper
Since the phlox are dying
and the daisies with their bright bodies
have shattered in the wind,
I go out among these last dancers,
cutting to the ground the withered asters,
the spent stalks of the lilies, the black rose,
and see them as they were in spring, the time
of eagerness and blossoms, knowing how
they will all sleep and return;
and sweep the dry leaves over them and see
the cold earth take them back as now
I know it is taking me
who have walked so long among them, so amazed,
so dazzled by their brightness I forgot
their distance, how of all
the chosen, all the fallen in the garden
I was different: I alone
could not come again to the world.
What a powerful and haunting poem. Beautiful.
Yes — and from a poet I just stumbled across.
Phlox are one of my favorite flowers. Like cosmos , another favorite, there is something maybe a bit less splashy about them. Maybe that is one reason I love them so much.
Lovely poem…I had never read it before.
I love how easily phlox can be divided — and how they thrive, uncomplainingly, under most conditions.
Beautiful. Thank you Liza.
Good to hear from you, Hannah.
Anders certainly got it right!
Here’s another by Hooper — a midwesterner, now in her eighties.
LENS
How different things must have looked
to my mother than they did to me.
There I am in the black-and-white photo
the summer the baby died.
I’m seven, trying out my pogo stick
with the two new girls next door.
We’re laughing, and I’m shouting something
to my brother, who wants his turn.
And there’s Dad, standing near the station wagon,
staring at the grass.
She must have stood far back, under the pear tree,
focusing, trying to fit us in.
I sense the end of summer near in your garden. Your words are as lovely as the flowers themselves. Thanks for being a soulful observer of nature. And of course sharing it with us.
Thanks, Em. Yes, sadly, the garden is going — but it’s such a beautiful death.