Never cry flower

I’ve been wanting to write more about the gardens but have felt a bit shy. I almost wish I hadn’t said anything yet, because I feel like I cried wolf, or, in this case, I cried flower. [I just realized that if you read flower in “Arabic” it is reWOLF!] But I tell you now, the gardens are really really, I promise you, really at their peak. If they peak even more than this I don’t know what I’ll do. [I’ll write another blog entry.] I wish I had a digital camera. No, even better I wish I could for 30 seconds surround your head with the vibrant swarm of rose-colored rose petals that this very moment is hovering one meter above the ground by the gate where I come in on the way to work. One stand of honest stems with shiny dark green leaves bears a nation of the same milky pink roses, which open not like cabbages, but with their petals tipping outward, the outer edges lit and lightened by the sun and the inner secret curves shading each other in darker and darker pink. And if you’re lucky, your 30 seconds that will be one of the unpredictable moments when the shy sweet fragrance breathes past your blessed nostrils and is gone.

When I mentioned the roses to a friend that works in the gardens, he pointed out that everything is blooming. And I looked around and it is, madly. The trees are flowering. Bushes, vines, and low annuals, all flowering. The mountainside is wearing its mardi gras costume. In her comment to “windy day” anonymous tc mentioned seeing a “new surprise of flowers on some hitherto unnoticed and inconsequential bush or tree”. The same thing here, a patch of mind-your-own-business green below some imposing agaves has suddenly and violently blushed an indiscrete lavender-pink, stealing the show altogether. And I can see sister patches up the mountain, looking just as unlikely and unaware of the stir they are causing. One of the gardeners must be dropping apt compliments.