Dahlias and daylilies
The Cove Journal by JoDee Samuelson
Early June. We wake Saturday morning to pouring rain and a solid bank of grey clouds. Not what we had hoped for, but it’s warm and calm and could be worse—we’re not having wildfires like out West! Our community Perennial Sale is going ahead rain or shine.
8 a.m. Our team assembles down at the Cove. The rain has eased up and we feel less anxious. Hundreds of plants were priced and labelled the night before with a red, green and black dot pricing system that goes something like this: “These primroses have almost finished blooming. Should they be $2 or $3?” “They’re good and healthy and will be beautiful next year. And look at the nice pot. Say $3.”
With coffee urn plugged in, pop-up tents popped up, raffle tickets organized, it’s where’s the manure truck? Oh, here’s our faithful farmer. Everyone is running around in circles, or at least I am, and customers are already milling about, but’s that always the way.
We’ve held this community fund-raiser for eighteen years. Sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes it rains, but we never fail to get a good crowd because Islanders are crazy about beautifying their yards. The thing about perennials is that they grow so well they crowd themselves out, so when we dig up our plants and share them with others we’re doing everyone a favour.
9 a.m. The coffee’s ready, the muffins set out. Customers pass by the tables choosing a violet here, a columbine there. No one’s in a hurry. Garden carts bump slowly across the parking lot laden with irises, forget-me-nots, hostas, rhubarb roots and dahlia bulbs. In the playground swinging children cry “Higher, higher!” and Grandpa obligingly gives a harder push.
By noon we’re out of everything except a few daylilies and some tattered cranesbills. From the canteen comes “Last call for coffee!” No takers? Out she goes. Clean-up over, we congratulate one another and head home. It’s been a lot of work but we got to hang out together. Plus I picked up some bi-colored daylilies and a white Siberian iris.
We’re keeping our community alive, one pansy, one muffin, one armful of rhubarb after another.
Everything is made up of small gestures, small particles. In The Edge of the Sea Rachel Carson writes about life in the shallow waters of the seashore, and here’s what she has to say about grains of sand:
Tiny grains of wet sand lie with little space between them, each holding a film of water about itself by capillary attraction… This miniscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. (p. 115)
All this life going on around me, underneath me! Do those “inconceivably minute beings” get along? I suppose they must, although I doubt they hold fund-raisers. I do know that we get along pretty well here in the Cove. Well enough that we’re already making plans for next year’s Perennial Sale.
