Evanescence

The dictionary defines evanescence as “the quality of being fleeting; impermanence,” but I especially associate the word with a  fleeting beauty. It seems to me that much of the beauty of a garden comes from its evanescent, ever-changing quality. When I told a visiting friend last year that the garden is never the same twice, he said “Well, not two days this year, but it will be like this again at the same time next year.” “No,” I said, “next year will be different. The weather won’t be the same; trees will have grown taller and changed the patterns of sun and shade.” One year, two plants create a luscious color combination when they bloom together; but the following year, their bloom times slightly diverge, or one is now overshadowed by a taller plant and barely blooms at all. A plant that struggled in last year’s drought conditions explodes into lush, exuberant blooms in this year’s rain.

Nothing makes me more aware of the evanescent quality of my garden’s beauty than the daylily season. Plants in the genus Hemerocallis (from Greek, meaning “beauty for a day”) exemplify the quality of evanescence; each big, gorgeous flower blooms for only one day. The quality of evanescence seems to dial up the intensity of an experience, and that is true in my experience of the daylily season. It begins with weeks of anticipation as I peer into daylily foliage hunting for flower buds on my morning walks through the garden and obsessively count flower scapes as they appear. I feel intense joy at seeing the first flower open in late June and intense excitement as more and more daylily flowers open each day until their bloom reaches a crescendo in mid-late July.

But evanescence is also a bittersweet quality; even as I welcome each new bloom, I’m aware that it will be gone tomorrow. As the acceleration of daylily blooms peaked in mid-July, with a half-dozen or more varieties beginning to bloom each day, the early varieties were opening their last flowers. Now, in early August, there are only two (very late) varieties that have not yet begun to bloom and many that have finished flowering for this year. Where a month ago, I was counting the varieties opening their first flowers each day, I am now counting those finishing their bloom. My joy in the beauty of those daylily flowers is entwined with the melancholy of saying goodbye to them until next year.

Sometimes I can get so wrapped up in the melancholy of saying goodbye to these favorite flowers that I forget to embrace the joy of the moment. So, this morning, I walked through the garden counting how many daylily varieties still had buds left to open – more than fifty, which is more than half of those I grow. It’s time to focus on the joy of those evanescent blooms.