LATER FLOWERS FOR THE BEES [by Mary Gilliland]

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry. The gardens are anything but decorous, or planned. Strays are welcome. Wild volunteers turn out whimsical or handsome. Some alight of their own volition, or via bird droppings (the enormous blackberries!); other seeds I pocket on my trail hikes and plant when I get home. A tall sedge with seedheads large as three ears of wheat jammed together. A low-growing tuft of a sedge, with spindly stem and tiny-star seeds. The average sedge—which I’ve multiplied and transplanted so thickly that it composes two mini-lawns; they don’t mind the tread of feet, and never need mowing.

White snakeroot 2The fluffy seeds of White Snakeroot were once riders in my pockets. What is the name for darkest green? This is the color of snakeroot’s leaves, and they are heart-shaped with a very tapering point. Creamy clusters of  florets form large cottony flat-topped hats on the 3-foot mature plants. I encourage them, transplant them—here, then there—for years, but they never come to much. Suddenly, 2022 is a mast year for white snakeroot: a 50 White snakerootfoot long drift behind the dead-hedges in the newish sanctuary that my husband and I call Back East. I can no longer give snakeroot away to neighbors who see them everywhere already!

Boneset is cousin to snakeroot. But boneset’s umbel is even cottonier, and its leaves are lances, and perfoliate: it looks as though the stem is growing Boneset-bloom2-514422617through the leaf itself. Boneset Boneset 2leaf magic, though, is the fact that there’s not one but two leaves involved around the stem—joined, and opposite each other. I love the late summer/fall bloomers, and these two species are thoroughworts. Where did that family of plants get its name?

The plants are always teaching me. At the base of Glastonbury Tor in the Vale of Avalon, my mind was turned from growing vegetables to growing flowers. In the Chalice Well garden, I reached down through magenta blooms to soft as lambs-ears silver-grey basal leaves and wondered whatever could this creature be. The plant is now a mainstay on the land I cultivate. I can’t tell you its name, for somewhere along the line a wrong name got recorded in the grooves of my brain.

                                         I garden in the shade on rock

                       transplant mullein, trellis pokeweed

          The bulbs for this place

are a tall order

The 9-page poem that holds those lines garnered compliments from editors but never a publication. Poets despite best effort may assume multiple magazine rejection means not good enough. But ‘Among the Trees,’ its title referencing Genesis 3:8, does reach print as the centerpiece of The Devil’s Fools, and Cynthia Hogue wows me, takes me by surprise, with her jacket comment highlighting this poem. My new book’s manuscript was a finalist in 2001 for NPS andcetera; its assemblage and re-assemblage ever since resembles the bricolage of gardening around my house. Last spring, Codhill Press selected my manuscript as not finalist but winner.

Now my husband will no longer have to keep the promise I extracted: to have Finalist carved on my tombstone. We think of poetry publishing as so scarce these days. But I’ve just learned that Harcourt picked Elizabeth Bishop’s first book from 800 manuscripts entered in a contest! With my mother’s mother I descend from midwife and iron welder who shipped to Philadelphia from the hunger roads of counties Mayo and Roscommon. Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

                                                                                                    ——MG, 12 October 2022

       

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Author: Mary Gilliland