Wood Anemone in Wartime

“The ground of that wood was white with the wood anemone flowering as if it was in a peaceful English wood and not in the second battle of the Somme”

— Written by my grandfather, Chalres Langridge, in 1920

My grandfather had intense and deeply blue eyes with a slender frame and rosy red cheeks, a walking cap seemingly always on his head ready to head into the hills. I remember him as quiet and reserved, but my grandfather was always ready to talk about plants. Born in 1899 into the working class in England, he had no opportunity for formal education beyond primary school, yet his knowledge of plants was that of a Professor of Botany. On my few childhood visits to England, we walked through the hills admiring plants we passed, returning to his cottage to identify and press the flowers. During our walks, I gazed at him in awe, at his magical ability to know so many wild beings, and decided my grandfather was the smartest person I knew, that he knew everything.

What I didn’t know about my grandfather on those childhood visits with wildflower walks and “tea time” was he was a prisoner of war, volunteering for WWI at the age of nineteen. Soon after enlisting, he was shipped to France and engaged in an unwinnable battle with the Germans. Taken prisoner, surrounded by wounded soldiers, they were marched, carrying the wounded, to an ammunition dump where they worked all day, herded into a cage to sleep at night. Over the next several months, he was marched across France to clean villages after battles, clear roads, and work in ammunition dumps. All around him death and starvation were looming. Yet, while the other “chaps” were stealing off to find a cigarette butt in the woods, he would steal off to the woods to pick a flower.

I know my grandfather picked flowers as a prisoner because he kept a nature journal. On slips of cigarette paper and a pencil stub purchased from another prisoner using the ½ franc he had left, my grandfather meticulously drew and annotated over three hundred species of plants during his eight months as a prisoner of war. While noting in his journal that each camp was worse than the last, that he was surrounded by sickness and starvation with no food provisions except the small bread ration he received once a day and dried vegetable soup at night, he focused on extoling the beauty of the “glorious” wildflowers.

Bleeding Heart flower drawn by my grandfather Charles Langridge in 1918 while a prisoner of war in France during World War I.

In my own garden, I stop to sketch the bleeding heart that is one of the first flowers to come up in the spring. It is an unmistakable flower, the outer petals form a puffy heart shape with a “drop” of blood falling from the bloom, where the flower hides its reproductive parts. I watch a bee trying to pollinate the flower, using its feet to part the petals that make up the drop of blood. It is almost the same day, over 100 years ago that my grandfather sketched a bleeding heart flower, dissected to reveal these hidden parts, one of the first plants he drew on cigarette paper. He had been a prisoner for a month, and the day before he drew the bleeding heart, while spring flowers were bursting out all around him, the first prisoner died.

White Oak Arabesque

Click image to download a PDF of the poem, or scroll below to read the text.

I’m gone now…

Yet seen

Hawk’s call honoring

Free from illness

Free from survival

Off the seasonal cycle

My bones remain

A settled calm in my architecture

After an early departure in the first 300

I still share my naked arabesque

A lifetime of dance memory

Buoyed by companion walnut, ash and spicebush

Whose thriving foliage embrace me

Woodpecker drums, churrs and purrs

Bat buddies still count on my cover

The next generation of coons have a clear shot to their cozy hollows

I will be loved until my last bone is offered up…

And long after

Yesterday I lost another arm

Now resting in leaf litter

Termites and ants will soon march in

Fungi and lichen looking forward

My sibling across the path, at the pond

Once fully decorated and noble

Mirrors me

Standing proud, reminding community sentients of her presence

Across the pond stands young cousin Willow Oak

Handsome, vibrant, vital host

And further up the hill

My dearest friend extends the widest reach of any oak for miles

A bridge… between our original stewards and newer kin humans

Chock full of fruit, ready to drop

Carrying forward our kindred witness into the next 300; our sacred grove lives on.

Girlhood As Toothache

I thought it was easy to be a girl. Being a girl meant eating stone fruit on the porch. It meant sticky red fingers and cherry pit desire paths. To be a girl was to press your cheek into the grass. To cover your ears. To be a pink-faced, wet-eyed brat. To be a girl was to dye each other’s hair, to kiss and stroke it when the results came back bleak. To be a girl was to pretend to be a mother, not to ever be one. To be a girl was to know everything. To run and to fall and kick and scream and take a nap in the heat. To wake up quiet and sweet. To be a mouthful of merengue and a teaspoon of vinegar. Girlhood was a toothache.

But when the poppies bloomed I could feel something had changed and girlhood meant none of those things. It meant hot baths and salt over your shoulder. It meant sticky red hands and pockets full of drugstore cherry balms. To be a girl was now to have to be a girl and to want to be with a boy and to want to be a boy but to never say any of it out loud. To be a girl was to lose. Every time. It was to be too much. To become a girl meant the death of girlhood. To become a girl, was to die.

The day the poppies bloomed in our yard I was curled in the oak rocking chair on our front porch, creating songs from the creaks and whines; drifting in and out of sleep lackadaisically. The night the poppies bloomed my mother wept.

So the next morning we slipped into our work boots and made a fete of ripping and hacking and pruning. We danced and cried and took breaks for cold drinks when it got too much. Then we got down to cream and floral underthings and ran into the lake. We ate stone fruit in the yard and left the pits in the grass. She dyed my hair in the sink, complete with kisses and fingernail desire paths on my forehead. We fell asleep on the front-room floor to the sweet smell of a night breeze through the garden. Now when the poppies bloom I let them grow and die and sneakily return under the next Taurus moon. They were never a warning sign. They were always a reminder to let the fire of girlhood burn. To be golden, wild, and perfect; to take naps in the heat. To wake up quiet and sweet. To be a mouthful of merengue and a teaspoon of vinegar. To be a toothache.

Performative

The garden is a stage with walls all around. The audience peers through doors, windows, and gates. When the ambulatory venture onto the scene, they must choose: are they performers too? Stagehands? Costumers? Perhaps they are the Director, the Producer, or even the Creator. Or are they interlopers passing through for a glance at the show?

Miss Ilex opaca, Prima, stands near the center, holding up her skirts. (The program names her Nellie Stevens, but the gardeners insist on her native origins). She’s almost alone on center stage now. Quercus, her sometime dance partner, has fallen and is gone. She misses the shade they gave. 

Her sinuous arms stretch out in the graceful port-de-bras she has developed over decades. But her arms, they are so tired. The costumers have discreetly and cleverly laced her heaviest limbs so she can stretch them ever outward, never drooping. To lower them would disrupt the beauty of the line. Spoil the performance. She is too well-trained to let that happen. 

Her cousin, also known as Opaca (but never Prima!), presents a decorative skein of green in the far corner past the pools. This Opaca is allowed to let her branches grow every which way. One would think she’d be happy in her sprawl, but her leaves are slightly yellow as if her roots are bitter. Both Opacas ignore the English (I. aquifolia) that flank the south gate. There’s a divide. Their berries are off-cycle. 

They are closer to Lexie, although she stays stretched flat against the South Wall. She doesn’t flaunt her lines even though her pose, twisted and threaded into the supports, is lovely. She is content to be a small sidenote on the set. 

All the hollies inside the walled garden are berried. Mr. Ilex sits outside—a wild, tangled globe at the end of a clipped boxwood hedge. Nellie isn’t sure of his parentage, but he associates with stray strangling grapes and rogue mulberries. Up the hill, under more boxwood, another Ilex sleeps in the shade. 

The hollies’ bright berries will steal the show in winter's grey cold. But for this season, it is the agile herbs like Bonnie Verby (Verbena bonariensis) and Annie Toms (Eriocapitella tomentosa ) that sway and twirl in every corner, charming the bees and catching the attention of the flutterbys. 

The walled-in stage sets the performers apart. They are special and protected. But if they fail to perform as required, they may be removed—replaced by the vivid new varieties of rudbeckia and echinacea in a summer’s afternoon.