Hi Ant. I am all better. Heh heh. I got RHODIES. I like that phrase. All better. Kids say that. And their mentors do. (It's not quite true, but pretend is another good phrase.)
Spouse just said the oaks are really pretty right now. Tall, Oregon white oaks. It's also - gee - raining. It's almost worth sitting thru the rain to be here at this time of spring. You can actually divide it into weeks, if you notice. The rhodies start in February and phase til the end of June (Aladdin). They are precise in their firing sequence. Often to the day. Seriously. I used to keep notes, when I was all better, and mucronulatum opened its first floret on the same day three of four years. So you could, in theory, tell exactly what day it is inside these two hundred plants, and maybe even name each day. Today might be Carolyn Grace Day. And Exotic Day will be the most Gauguin-ish day of the hottest tropical colors.
This is the ONLY time of year you guys should all be jealous. Go on. Nothing, no where, can be better than this. Equal, maybe.
Carolyn Grace, a yellow and apricot rhody eight feet tall and wide, is blooming just outside the door. It's basically a small tree. The buds opening into the trusses start copper-orange, then loosen and unfurl in apricot, and then the individual florets (they're individual full flowers of the truss) inflate into clear bright yellow. The blooms are so densely packed nearly all of the green of the plant leaves disappears.
Each bloom bud at a leaf terminus, of which there are probably 130, 150, 200, opens into a truss of eight florets. There are often two and three bloom buds at each terminus ~ twenty four florets from three almonds. The florets on this one are each about 2.5 inches wide and 2 deep. So the truss is a sphere of flowers about seven inches across. They are on the woody shrub so densely that they cram together. Into a virtually solid mass. In the beginning the whole plant is apricot, and ends in complete clear light yellow. There is a peak of that combination for a few days, and one specific day when the entire balance crescendos.
Today is the day. About half the apricots are there, and the rest are fresh yellow flowers. You can still see leaves behind the apricot in places, but the other half-area of the vision is sunlight yellow without a hint of orange. I can't think of a name for this yellow. Things don't really get any more yellow in the spectrum. There is no mustard, no brown, no nothing in there. Absolutely clear, like a note. Like late summer straw? A white yellow, maybe, with intense yellow pigment saturation. There is a rhody of similar color, that its discoverer also couldn't describe, and just named it lutescens, from the Latin yellow. I understand his point.
So there are probably 1600+ good-sized flowers packed on that bush. Right in your face as you walk by to the door. The flower mass is actually denser that the foliage itself. They go to a lot of work, they do. I don't know how they suck all of the energy required for this massive construction and colorizing effort out of the ground in two short weeks. When the flowers fall they will coat the ground several inches deep. Then the new leaves will pop up in shapes similar to the trussing. These are a translucent blue-green, like lotus leaves. Rain drops ball up into marbles.
Behind it are two other large plants, Luscombei at twice its size (fluorescent pink? With larger flowers) and the extremely rare Mary Mayo, which is in tropical colors I can't name, with the largest flowers.
Gotta go. Bye. |
