It was lecherous Zephyrus, too, who caused the death of the fair nymph Anemone. Noticing her windy husband’s infatuation with the young beauty, Zephyrus’s jealous wife had the nymph driven into exile, where she died of a broken heart, her body becoming the windflower that returns to life at the onset of spring.
And, for a final tragic tale, we have poor Narcissus, who idled away his days gazing at the reflection of his own face in pools. Though he came to symbolize self-absorption and egotism, this was an unfair legacy since the poor fellow was consumed with his own reflection only because it so closely resembled the face of his lost sister. Nemesis, the god of vengeance, turned him into the flower we know, destined to stand forever peering down at an image of himself.
What’s uncanny about all these old stories of springtime tragedy is how accurately they capture the sense of loss and unseasonal wistfulness one feels, even in a lingeringly cool and moist season, as successive waves of springtime flowers, like young love itself, flourish then so quickly fade away.
The Great Canadian Hoax
I’m going to propose that spring is the least Canadian of seasons. Collectively, we Canucks peak in autumn with what poet Wilfred Campbell celebrated as “Miles and miles of crimson glories, / Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze.” The melancholy of fall, its sense of brilliantly extinguished expectations, fits our national psyche. We’re passably good at summer, able to savour its sweet berries and wild roses, to splash and cavort at the lake. But even here we lack a truly sybaritic streak, being persistently aware in summer of how bad the mosquitoes are this year and how swiftly the season passes. Winter is our real métier, our true superbia. Ice crystals of chilling brilliance, the Northern Lights shimmering over untracked drifts of snow.
But the subtle spells of spring hold less magic for us than they might, I think because rapture is not an essentially Canadian condition. Our native caution serves us well in not giving way to romantic confections about the sweetness of the season. Should the prairie farmer, facing another year of disastrous losses—courtesy of subsidy curtailments and clever new trade arrangements—be rejoicing that planting time’s at hand? Should the homeless, having survived the rigours of another winter on the mean streets of a Canadian city, be doing cartwheels because the tulips are in bloom?
A proper savouring of the season requires a jaunty optimism that a rebirth of wonder is at hand. But that’s a tough sell when you’re menaced by the risk of flooding after breakup; the detritus of dirt, litter and dog feces deposited by melting snow; and the almost instantaneous arrival of mosquitoes and black flies. Small wonder we’re less than ecstatic. Then you get caught up in some moronic “Spring Fling” at the local mall where you’re exhorted to “spring into the season” by cleaning up the yard, painting the house or generally exerting yourself in ways you’d rather not. Ah, for the dark comforts of January, when you could lie dormant without remorse.
No, springtime in Paris is not the same thing at all as the thaw in Moose Jaw. Who among our poets has been inclined to sing, “Oh, to be in Ontario now that April’s here!” And even if you did genuinely thrill to the season, the damn thing’s over quicker than a Hollywood marriage. The Calgary chinook’s the epitome of the Canadian spring: from numbing cold to subtropical heat in a single afternoon. It’s like a pubescent sexual encounter: months of panting anticipation climaxing in a five-second gush. Suddenly that’s summer.
I believe our ambivalence toward the free-spiritedness of spring accounts for why virtually all our political leaders are such grey characters—pinched and parsimonious, the cronies of winter. Is there ever so much as a hint of spring’s insouciance at a First Ministers conference? Even posing for the ritual photo in their casual slacks and sweaters, they’re a dour and storm-door bunch. And that’s how we want them to be; that’s why we elect them. We did the other thing once, with Pierre and Margaret. A blood-red rose in the teeth, and all that. We let ourselves be springtime silly; we dared to hope and dream, to look about with laughter in our eyes—and you see where that got us. We’d prefer not to make April fools of ourselves that way again. Rather than risk disillusionment, we’ll stick with this dreary pack of plodders, trudging the wastelands of fiscal prudence, with T.S. Eliot grumbling about how “April is the cruellest month,” because it suggests a resurrection that we’d really rather not risk.
Except in British Columbia, where we’re inclined to elect eccentrics to high office. At least some of the time, we like our politicians with a pinch of the wild riot of spring in them. These generally are in and out of office faster than a March hare. And that’s because BC—at least coastal BC—breaks from the rest of the nation in its experience of spring. Here the season begins around the end of January and concludes sometime in late June. While the rest of the country’s still locked in permafrost, the coast exults in an eruption of blossoms, and later on, while everyone else is roasting in summer sunshine, we’re still tramping through the foggy dew.
Some residents—generally recent arrivals from points east—take to unseemly preening at this time, but the wise or wizened among us do not. We know the perils of life in perpetual spring, the whirling topsy-turviness of luteinizing hormones run amok, the recklessness of the heart and of pulsing blood. Dynamic and exciting surely, but a bit alarming and thoroughly un-Canadian, providing a cautionary tale to the more sensible rest of the country.
But then, inevitably, preposterously, spring breaks across the whole nation. Everywhere, people burst outdoors, rhapsodizing over the scent of lilacs or hyacinths, forgetting our customary circumspection, abandoning the First Ministers to their fiscal retentiveness, euphoric as raw life explodes all around us and our wary ambivalence is at last swept away in the delirium of spring.
It’s Showtime
Horticultural trendiness is not something I have a whole lot of time for, but it is fascinating to observe how various enthusiasms ebb and flow through the world of gardening. Back in the 1970s when we started growing on Denman Island, it was all about food. Back to the Land, Self-Sufficiency, Grow Your Own—we were rich in slogans, even if not in topsoil. Harrowsmith magazine and The Whole Earth Catalog were our guiding texts. Mocked at the time as addle-headed idealists, we “new pioneers” had a fundamentally sensible ambition: to live and eat healthily by cultivating our own organic fruits, vegetables and livestock.
At a certain point—for Sandy and me it was in the late eighties—the lure of ornamental gardening began elbowing its way into the process. The island’s big vegetable plots became complemented—in extreme cases, usurped—by equally ambitious rose arbours and perennial beds. Shortly thereafter, a mania for ornamental landscaping swept across the culture, as it does every few decades. Lawns and tennis courts were torn up and swimming pools filled in to provide space for dreamy plantings. Throughout the nineties, glossy new gardening magazines were launched, the number and size of garden clubs grew exponentially, specialty nurseries abounded, gardening television programs were inescapable and the gardening sections in bookstores threatened to push mere literature out the back door.
Plus, flower and garden shows—from the modest to the monumental—were mounted in many communities. Ever the opportunist, I became a regular at several of them, learning to appreciate in the process how these extravaganzas could get us jump-started midway through what otherwise might have been a decent period of hibernation.
The Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle has, over its twenty-six years, grown into the third-largest such show in the United States. It’s mounted in early February, and invariably packed with enthusiasts from all over the region. But for a really startling contrast between stark winter outside and blooming gardens within, no West Coast show could compete with Canada Blooms, the humongous flower and garden festival held in March, when Toronto can be at its least appealing. Back in the day, the festival was housed in the cavernous Metro Toronto Convention Centre and soon became one of the major garden shows in North America, attracting well over a hundred thousand visitors during its five-day run. The opening-night gala was a glittering affair adorned with divas, danseuses and the horticultural who’s who of Upper Canada.
As befits the Big Smoke, everything was big at Canada