I tried to pick a few of my favorite flower yesterday, the side-of-the-road, stems-too-tough-to-twist-off chicory.
My grandma told me last year that she'd tried to transplant these quirky blue flowers into her garden once, but they'd failed; they're wildflowers, and they grow best in the stark, rocky soil on the sides of highways or sandy abandoned urban lots. They didn't do well in her fertile garden beds.
I remember picking -- or trying to pick -- chicory flowers as a kid. They were beautiful (the inspiration for my favorite color for years, until I abandoned their blue for orange), but tough. It took dedication and a patient mom to stand pulling and twisting the stems until they peeled apart in threads. I almost always went home with more snapdragons and Queen Anne's lace than I'd wanted, and fewer spiky blue flowers.
Yesterday I happened to have a knife with me, so I sliced through the stems with no real trouble. I gathered a few stalks and carried them into the CVS with me. By the time I'd come out, they were wilted beyond repair. Emergency water rationing (plunking their ends into my water bottle) did nothing at all to help. Unlike roses, whose skeletons stay as reminders (of love or betrayal or what-have-you), chicory blossoms last only in the now, until they're picked. They dry into tiny fists, unwilling to leave any evidence that they were once bright and verging-on-perky.
They're the toughest, most ephemeral flowers ever.
Leave it to me to favor the difficult and strange over the typical -- I still think they're lovely.
Since their loveliness isn't transferable to my coffee table, I'll have to settle for this blog post to commemorate it.
1 comment:
hmmmm. i always called these cornflowers. turns out cornflowers are also blue, but very different (genus? species?) than chicory. wonder where i got that piece of misinformation?
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