Plum Blossoms

I’m high on blooms and perfumes as one is want to be this time of year. So much coming into flower, so much distraction muddling the mind. I’m practically chanting, “festooned with blooms along the boughs”, as if rhythm and repetition might distill from the kaleidoscope of lyric language remembered and imagined a verse, a line, a poem, a poet. But plum blossoms have nuked my neocortex with sensuous scent and beauty beyond irresistible. Memory is a muse amused, not a library.

Gardeners, landscapers, poets and painters have romanced the seasonal blossoms of fruit trees for hundreds of years. I am no exception despite my utilitarian, upcountry ways. An orchard is a geometric bouquet of blooms, an annual riot against leafless canopies and gray, drizzly spring days. And even when blossoms flutter earthward and the boughs fill with thick plumes of adolescent foliage, there remains a subtle nobility in the orchard’s orderly procession. (Source: Orchard Rumination)

In Rosslyn’s orchard the spring succession of fruit trees flowering is as seductive and subversive as sunrise. As springtime itself. Katie’s candids capture the moment delicately, honestly. Plum blossoms. Swelling. Bursting. Unfurling.

Soon breezes — and possibly a heavy rain or hailstorm — will disperse the plum blossoms. But not yet.

Plum Blossoms

Flowers flutter,
fragrant. 
Round petals
white as the snow
they endure,
persevere,
blush faint pink,
sweet scent 
perfuming the orchard 
into the meadow beyond, 
still soggy
with echoes of winter. 
Petal by petal, 
spring advances
the season.

And then I have it. Sort of. It’s “hung with bloom along the bough”, and it comes from A. E. Housman’s poem “Loveliest of Trees.”

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

— A. E. Housman

Cherry blossoms. Not plum blossoms. Honest mistake. Let’s right the wrong.

on the plum tree
one blossom, one blossom worth
of warmth

— Hattori Ransetsu (1654-1707)

Each plum blossom a measure of progress toward warmer days. Springtime springing, blossom by blossom.

Blossom by blossom the spring begins…

— Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Atalanta in Calydon”

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NB: Amongst the plum blossoms, pinker petals are beginning to burst. These are the peach blossoms.

Perhaps, rain and wind permitting, I’ll follow up with a peach blossoms post soon…