First Flowers

     About three times a season, a First-Flower Farm customer at one of the farm markets where I sell my bouquets asks me, "So: What is the 'first flower'?" It's a way to make conversation, usually—they don't really need an answer. Yet, I always take the question in earnest (I'm Midwestern to the bone). In the name of my farm, the first flower is a very specific one: an Easter lily I so vividly recall discovering, as a two-year-old, in my grandmother's arid Michigan flowerbed. The Easter lily is used as a fragrant symbol of the Resurrection and this one was a true ambassador of that miracle. Nothing grew easily in her windswept, barren Northern garden. That this marginally hardy bulb would not only have survived the assaults of greenhouse forcing, poor soil, striped gophers, freeze-thaw cycles and hot spring winds, but  managed to re-bloom the following spring, was a testament to botanical determination if not out-and-out divine might. Of course, I wouldn't have understood any of this at age two, but I distinctly recall my need to wade in among the scraggly sedum and wild alyssum growing at its feet to press my face into that creamy, fragrant trumpet which stood almost as tall as I did. I remember feeling not so much an intellectual realization that I wanted to be a gardener, just at that moment, as a recognition that my destiny and that of this flower were intertwined: I identified as a gardener. So that's my "first flower"—progenitor to the millions of vegetative things I have grown from seed to seed ever since.
    In terms of the-first-thing-to-bloom-at-the-farm answer, I always told people I supposed First-Flower's season began with the clumps of snowdrops which bloom around the back steps here on the farm when the March sun heats up the stucco siding and asphalt nearby.  However, that was a misconception. Early they are, but they aren't as early as this.

Here is the first flower: Hamamelis vernalis, in the farm's first bouquet of the year. This was picked and arranged to grace the table for my husband's birthday dinner on February 1. Even Puxatawney Phil was still asleep, but the cravings of the gardener neither sleep nor slumber, and I was darned if I was going to spend money on the very flowers-flown-from-elsewhere I so often educate/rant about the rest of the year. Armed with freshly-sharpened off-season clippers, I sallied forth to discover a single dried hydrangea blossom, some straw-colored quaking oat grass and seed-blown skeletons of miscanthus grass, and the gorgeous stems of coral bark willow, which carry the exact same coral shade as the subtle flowers of these hamamelis, a.k.a "witch hazel."
     In the warmth of the house, the fragrance drifts across the table in the same evanescent way it does in the yard on a chance spring day, pooling in unexpected places yards from the shrub. It's a trickster of a plant, doling out fragrance by its own caprices. The first harbingers of spring are like that. They are subtle as the snow fleas that pepper the hiking path; quiet as the drips falling from the broken branches of the maple; subtle as these tiny blooms with their twisted ribbon petals, lining branches still holding fast to last fall's leaves. But this time of year, my eyes are hungry as the next person's for the first colors to mark the turning of the seasons; it takes very little to bring great joy.
     Yes, climate change is a very present worry. I'm as apt as the next farmer to doubt the very conscientiousness  of actually enjoying a sign of spring so early in the year, when we should be under a thick blanket of snow. Every choice I make on the farm this summer will be made with respect for the ecosystem and environmental preservation foremost. Meantime, here it is: the season opener, an offering—as unlikely, in the bleak midwinter, as that lush Easter lily in that April yard, and undoubtedly, a joy to behold: The First Flower.     Bloom where you are planted.