So let’s talk about those wild Primroses in the front yard…
Many springs ago, my mother came down from the north to visit and to revel in the warm Texas springtime. It was a good year for it, to the extent I can remember it: the sun shined, the sky was blue, the wild flowers were blooming, that sort of thing, I suppose.
And one day, she and the fair and industrious Trudy ventured out to the Wildflower Research Center that was having their annual spring wildflower sale. And they came home with hands full of four inch pots with greenery and promises of color.
My mother handed me one. For my birthday, I think it was. A salvia of some sort the label said, which I poo-poo’d, because from the look of the leaves it was clearly not a salvia. And I thought to myself (and probably let show on my face) that I thought this was a mislabeled volunteer of some sort. Still, we planted it in the front, in the bed beneath the Monterey Oak and wished the little orphan well.
fast forward…
It was indeed no sort of salvia. It was a primrose of some kind. Not the pink or yellow evening varieties that bloom this time of year, rather it was some wild thing that grew legs over the years and crept gradually to the south, following puddles of sun admitted by the overhanging oak.
And every year, without fail this wild kind of Primrose has raised up out of the leaf litter about this time of year and stretched out its lanky arms and raised its pale pink blossoms that open in the morning and track the sun as it arcs across the sky and close as it sets in the west. Blossoms that open the next day and the next about this time of year and whisper that message from my mother on that spring day back then: Happy Birthday.
Thanks, mom. It was the perfect wild thing.