Finally naming the flower

We pooled around the receptionist’s desk, fanning our distress and stirring each other’s sorrow over the impending loss of a bush. Higher-ups had decided that its lushness—leaves so tight together no breath could penetrate, flowers so open a woman easily sees in it her own bareness—started to harm instead of lend some joy.

It had grown even more with each pruning, blocking the side entrance, but especially sunlight on the breakfast nook, crowding the vine rose at Marpole Place, the neighborhood house that gathered us, volunteers, into a fiercely caring-about-everything warm bodies like that morning, when it had to be felled.

 

But in truth, I had thought, I’d inject a bit of venom to the rising sentiment, saying that in spite of its arresting beauty, how disappointing to smell it, expecting a rush of fragrance which it had none—what variety of rose is it, again? Patty caught my mild derision, and sharply shot this at me, “What rose? It’s a camellia!” she said.

I had felt slightly disgraced that all I knew of this flower comes from Alexander Dumas’s novel, “La Dame aux Camelias,” adapted by Verdi into “La Traviata”—meaning for me, the camellia couldn’t be but fiction. Yet, on my sunset walks to the river park when newly arrived here, I would pass under the shade of this “rose bush,” the first to burst in the spring, awed by its unabashed red (or white) flowers with petals splayed from a vivid navel.

Within a week, the blossoms would fall, splattered curiously, not petal by petal but whole, on the ground, a raging “scandal” carpeting my steps—how apt a flower Dumas chose to personify Marguerite, his novel’s main character, the courtesan who would wear a white camellia if available for her lover, and a red one if not.

I felt I had to recover my self-esteem, sidling to Audrey, whispering how I had always sensed the illicit this flower hinted at, and so blatant, too, that seeing a little girl once in church, using the flower like a powder puff, had looked sensual. “Hey, that’s overdoing it, which side are you on, again?” “Patty, who had overheard my relentless disdain, chided me, adding a challenge to name the “purple flowering weeds” (my term) that had to be uprooted, as well.

I’ve seen these wild weeds on Granville Street’s island since the first summer I arrived. And along hedges, my sister and I coming home from Saturday vigil Mass would often pick, pinch and sniff the blossoms, wondering what this scented wildness could be. How could I have recognized “lavender” from illustrations on the wrap of my mother’s treasured lavender soap an aunt used to send? “It’s lavender,” I had burst in on my sister that morning after the protest, recalling a mere whiff of its scent in Mama’s soap.

In a while, we, doleful volunteers, huddled under a vaguely familiar tree with tiny white heavily redolent flowers. I had so wanted to ask its name, but it seemed irrelevant at that point, as BC Tree Felling arrived, and whispers of sympathies among us heightened.

‘Twas then that I recalled, we had the same tree right by the side entrance of our condominium apartment, about which we did complain; like the camellia, it blocked the gate so much so that if in a rush, a branch would slap you—hard if breezy.
Crossing the courtyard on my way up to our floor, I found Alana hunkered over the day lilies, as if waiting for the question I had carried home: You mean the laurel,” she said. My sister leaped when I told her its name.

“Can we then gather the leaves to dry and not wait for packets from Manila?” she wondered. Unfortunately we can’t with this Grecian variety, a poet’s crown maybe—but the condiment has to be of bay laurel leaves.