Man’s world
Joe Bennett’s big announcement: he has a new favourite plant.
Which plant has the best name? I used to think it was the buttercup. Its flower is both buttery and cup-like, and the combination forms a ripple of syllables that pleases the tongue and sings of summer. But I have a new favourite.
Come with me. Let’s step out through the garage, crammed with stuff I lack the heart to biff, and turn right by the wall of lavender that is both inadvertent and perilous. Inadvertent because it has thrived so well on neglect that I have to shear it twice a year to allow passage between it and the equally rampant jasmine. Perilous because in summer it is thronged with bees and the bees are keen to have the lavender to themelves.
But there are no bees this time of year so pluck a dried flower and rub it between thumb and finger to release the authentic scent of the gift shop.
Take care not to trip on the rooster-maiming wheelbarrow and then – what, have I never told you? I parked the wheelbarrow one afternoon at the top of the drive and gravity grabbed it. A few yards down the drive my rooster, name of Brian, was very much preoccupied with a member of his harem and the wheelbarrow, going at a good lick, struck him in flagrante delicto. I’d never heard such squawking. I’ve been known to say since that Brian limped for the rest of his life, thus giving the story moral clout. But it isn’t true.
Anyway, there, just beyond the table that I built myself but that never quite cut it as outdoor furniture and now serves as a saw bench, is our destination, our target, the best-named plant in the world. Yes, that drab little tree, leafless, skeletal and nondescript. It’s a tree you simply do not remark on. Its leaves are leaf-like, its shape tree-like, and its seeds, which I noticed for the first time last year and planted half a dozen of in pots, seed-like. This tree is arboreal anonymity.
Of the half dozen seeds, three sprouted, rather to my surprise, and they did so endearingly, with the leaves emerging rolled like a beach towel. But once they’d unrolled, they became just ordinary leaves attached to ordinary seedling trees. Have you identified it yet?
The Latin name is Chimonanthus praecox and the clue is in the praecox. From praecox we get precocious. A precocious child is one that develops early. Does that help?
This tree develops so early that if you were to walk this way again a month or two from now, when the land is frozen like iron and the air bites and the sun peeps over the rim of the Port Hills for barely half an hour a day, and if you were to pass between the shivering lavender and the dormant jasmine, hurdle the wheelbarrow, skirt the saw bench and look up, you would see that even in this Wenceslassy cold, the bare branches of this dull tree have somehow pushed out a mass of waxy yellow flowers, and the air is filled with a scent, a perfume that defies the power of words to pin it down. But it isn’t hard to pin down in a single word the feeling it engenders and that feeling is hope. The hope that winter will pass and spring follow. The heart lifts at the thought.
And the tree, as you have already guessed, is wintersweet. ✤