Every year, I have a summer love affair with a flowering tree.
One year it was oleander. Maybe it was the name. Oleander rolls off the tongue sensuously and speaks of summer romance. Or maybe it was the colours - white, pink, occasionally orange, crimson; like the stages of passion.
Another year I lived somewhere else and everywhere I looked that early summer, there were smudges of an unearthly blue, like low-lying clouds, except clouds could never be that colour. They were the fleeting canopies of jacaranda trees and they seemed to hover and drift and then, like summer romance, they were gone.
This year, red flowering gums have taken my eye. They are everywhere, unashamedly displaying their vermilion fire. They line streets, they lean over fences, they soften the verges along railway lines and they mass together in stunning parkland plantings. They are red like you've never seen red.
A few days ago I walked from the train station at the end of a dry, windy day that was still as hot as an oven and on the way I picked a spray from the flowering gum at the end of the street and took it home and stuck it in the old glass cream bottle I use for a vase - one half pint is embossed on the thick glass - and I put it on the table and it was the nicest centrepiece for a summer dinner you could think of.
*
I think that I shall never hum
A song as lovely as a gum.
*
(The linked photographs are from Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants, whose website is a good place to look if you're in love with a gum tree and you want to know her name.)
One year it was oleander. Maybe it was the name. Oleander rolls off the tongue sensuously and speaks of summer romance. Or maybe it was the colours - white, pink, occasionally orange, crimson; like the stages of passion.
Another year I lived somewhere else and everywhere I looked that early summer, there were smudges of an unearthly blue, like low-lying clouds, except clouds could never be that colour. They were the fleeting canopies of jacaranda trees and they seemed to hover and drift and then, like summer romance, they were gone.
This year, red flowering gums have taken my eye. They are everywhere, unashamedly displaying their vermilion fire. They line streets, they lean over fences, they soften the verges along railway lines and they mass together in stunning parkland plantings. They are red like you've never seen red.
A few days ago I walked from the train station at the end of a dry, windy day that was still as hot as an oven and on the way I picked a spray from the flowering gum at the end of the street and took it home and stuck it in the old glass cream bottle I use for a vase - one half pint is embossed on the thick glass - and I put it on the table and it was the nicest centrepiece for a summer dinner you could think of.
*
I think that I shall never hum
A song as lovely as a gum.
*
(The linked photographs are from Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants, whose website is a good place to look if you're in love with a gum tree and you want to know her name.)
With such beauty all around, why don't we do a center piece like that more often. Like the poem!
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad to hear I'm not the only person who is in love with a tree - I grew up w/ a beautiful Japanese maple in my front yard that I loved. We just recently bought our first house, and it just happens to also have a Japanese maple out front....
ReplyDeleteI grew up with the largest flowering gum you could ever imagine, its trunk is easily ten feet in diameter. It grew in the sandy bayside soil which held a secret underneath - water. Now the parrots have come back to town they noisily screech to each other as they enjoy their liquid lunch, spreading gum flower confetti everywhere. A bit like a pub I used to drink at really.
ReplyDelete