It was the evening of a cloudy day and I had my face in among the clumps of blooming daylilies, which I was trying to protect from the constant encroachment of witch grass. It's a minor art -- to lie on the ground and reach arm's length into the forest of leaves, careful not to knock the fragile buds off the scapes, and identify and remove the underground stems of the witch grass by feel alone. I had pulled out a heap of noxious weeds and was lost, absolutely lost, in the project, when suddenly, from behind my back the about-to-set sun emerged and illuminated the scene For no more than thirty seconds the daylily spectrum was on full display: apricot, pink, a range of yellows, each slightly different from its neighbor, a near white, along with a few fully saturated, shimmering crimsons, plus some bicolors with their cute contrasting throats. For a glorious moment, everything leaped at me. It was truly theatrical to be surrounded by such brilliant colors and shapes and fragrances -- a rare and memorable instance of transcendent aesthetic bliss.
The next day, on he telephone, I tried to convey my rapture to The Daughter. She was concerned. One of her friends had had a similar moment. Her friend was walking in the Colorado mountains and came upon a magnificent field of wild flowers. The experience was powerful and life-changing, and she's now, after years of study, an Episcopal priest. "You're not going to tell me that it was a religious experience, are you?" I could hear the worry in her voice. My response: "I would have thought you'd have known me better than that."
Some people conflate beauty with spirituality and religion. I'm not one of those people. Beauty is transcendent, yes, but it's also material and explicable.
No question but that the profusion of daylily colors is glorious. For a hundred years now, careful hybridizers have worked on the homely fulvous lily, a roadside weed sometimes inelegantly called the "outhouse lily", and have transformed it into the bearer of the rainbow colors in which it now sparkles. Thank you, clever daylily breeders, for your generations of imaginative work. Thanks also to the parcel post driver who every year brings me three or four more new varieties from Oakes in Tennessee. And while I'm at it, I would also like to thank the people who designed and built that brown truck and its rubber tires and constructed the roads and refined the gasoline -- no border of daylilies without their help. Nor without the designers and manufacturers of my spade and my favorite dibble and my all-purpose dandelion puller. I could add other equally essential people -- go right back to the first practitioners of smelting -- but I think I've made my point. The daylilies do not declare the glory of god; they declare the glory of human civilization and human enterprise.
I grow a single wild fulvous lily on the grounds, just as a reminder.
It's drab.
Comments