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By Julie Zickefoose
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Digging the Mystery Daffodil

Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:28

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A fine spring day. The temperature hit 70 in the afternoon. Chet and I had to get out and see what was up on Dean’s Fork, put a few more miles on the chassis. Just the sky alone would have been enough, but the warmth was intoxicating. To run in a tank and shorts, feel the warm wind on my skin.

A couple days later, it plunged to 18, and we got an inch of snow. Such is spring.

This is why it’s good to live in the moment, and grab it when it comes.

When there’s almost nothing green yet growing, green catches the eye. I fixed my binoculars on these clumps across Dean’s Fork. They look like daffodils, but there’s no explanatory tumbledown homestead near. Odd. Could they have been washed out and deposited here by a flood? I don’t know. Mystery abounds.

I picked my way across the stream. These are worth examining.

They’re plucking at my memory. It’s a daffodil, I think, but I can’t recall what kind has such broad, round-tipped leaves.

You know what I’m going to do here. I’m going to go all Stone Age.

I search the stream bank for a trowel, and find a stone that’s bladelike but cupped.

Those bulbs are really in there, with long strong roots going down about 8″. I have to dig for quite awhile to encompass them. Finally I can dig no deeper and am forced to pull the bulbs as gently as I can. Luckily, the roots come with them.

This takes awhile, and Chet settles down to bask and stand guard.

She does this from time to time. Hunkers down and digs and mutters for a long time. I just wait it out. I have nothing else I have to be doing. This is what I do.
Voila! I have my specimens. I take only three, and leave dozens of others in the two clumps to grow in peace. Another cool thing about plants…you can take a little piece, and if you’re patient, it’ll replicate the original plant in time. You don’t have to pillage the whole thing.

I bundle them in wet leaves and leave them in a puddle, because I have several more miles to run. Well, traverse.

On down the road I come on the Peony House, the tumbledown structure where I found my beloved Dean’s Fork heirloom peony years ago.

Here’s how it looked in situ on May 15, 2014. This unexpected shot of white in front of a barely discernible structure. Once a proud part of someone’s garden, now just persisting there because that’s what peonies do best. Everything else has been subsumed by ragweed and ironweed and star chickweed, but the peony stands strong.

It makes me happy to see it prosper, even if no one but me ever sees it or kneels to smell its heavenly bouquet.

Four years ago, in the fall, I dug two small eyes, planted them in my asparagus/rhubarb bed, and waited three years for them to make flowers. They finally bloomed in 2014. They should be wonderful this spring.

P.S. It smells like roses in heaven.

Near the tumbledown house I see a small bulb sending up shoots. I crush a leaf, note its oniony scent and find it’s an allium, decide to leave it grow. It’s probably a little yellow one I already have. These are the places you find heirloom plants.

I pick up my bulbs on the way back up the road, bundle them in wet leaves and sandwich them between a couple of slabs of bark. I know if I root around Harold’s weekend mancabin, I’ll find a cup that will work better as a transport system.

C’est voila!

I bring them home and plant them immediately in one of my terraced beds. I can’t wait to see what they’ll be. If these small bulbs don’t bloom this year, I can still find out.

Because the next morning, I pull up at my financial advisor’s office in town and find the same plant growing in a clump by the parking lot. Ah! I knew it looked familiar. It may not turn out to be anything special. But then again it may.

Of course, there’s always the chance mine are different. That’s the fun of plants, and the mystery of finding them, digging them out and spreading them around. Someone years ago planted them at a homestead now long rotted and gone. And there they are, still fixing to bloom in the middle of the woods. Whatever they are, they’ve probably lived there a hundred years, winter after dry summer after winter.

The shadows grow long and we turn for home, thinking about spring and clouds, daffodils and dinner, the enduring wonder of plants that persist.

Julie Zickefoose is a painter and writer who lives on a nature sanctuary in Appalachian Ohio. She is the author of Letters from Eden and The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds, due in spring 2012. http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com

Source: http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com/2015/03/digging-mystery-daffodil.html

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