When Keith Reid penned the famous lyrics to the debut song for the British rock group Procol Harum in 1967, his inspiration for the title came from a conversation he had overheard at a party when a man exclaimed to a woman, “You have turned a whiter shade of pale.”
Reid thought it was a cool compliment and wished he had uttered the phrase. Quite frankly, I am glad I wasn’t the woman. Coming from the tan generation, I don’t think I would have taken kindly to the utterance.
If pale was trendy in the UK in 1967, it’s certainly still trendy in the NYC plant world in 2013. I was giving a class on perennial garden maintenance as part of my Home Gardening Series, which meets every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. (free to all garden visitors), and I was amazed at how many ‘rad’— or should I date myself and say ‘groovy’—perennials were a whiter shade of pale.
Phlox carolina ‘Miss Lingard’ seems to be popping up everywhere this year. I see her in the new Native Plant Garden, in the Children’s Adventure Garden, in the Home Gardening Center and on my tours of the High Line. She is an early version of the stalwart Phlox paniculata ‘David’—a must for any white garden.
It’s come in fits and starts this year. Snow falls one day, only to vanish in an instant through heat or a heavy rain. With all the yo-yoing we have experienced this winter, oscillating from warm to cold, the fluctuating temperatures have sent me and many of my colleagues home with lingering ailments as our bodies try to figure out what’s going on.
While walking through the Garden in these early days of spring, I notice that Mother Nature is equally confused. The persistent cold has slowed down the cycle of spring, leaving us somewhere between one and two weeks behind schedule in terms of spring bloom. Once the warm temperatures arrive in earnest, things will accelerate. What this means for now is that some of the early signs of spring–the ones that we usually like to see from our living room windows–are out and worth perusing.
The Cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) started flowering around the very end of March this year, whereas they usually bloom sometime in the middle of the month. As one of the many cheerful harbingers of spring, they’re a welcome sight; the 15-foot, multi-stemmed branching shrub is smothered with tiny umbels bursting with golden yellow, star-shaped flowers.
Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.
