In Praise of Wildflowers by Eden Monroe

 

 

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In Just Before Sunset, Susanne Briggs is a talented watercolourist whose paintings of New Brunswick wildflowers are always in demand at a popular Saint John art gallery.

Some of the wildflowers mentioned in this romantic suspense novel are found in abundance throughout New Brunswick, but are not exclusive to the province. Wildflowers such as red clover, white clover (both members of the legume family of plants), jewelweed, pearly everlasting and the majestic blue flag iris also grow wild elsewhere. Nature does not recognize manmade boundaries and borders.

Growing up we had lots of fun bursting the seedpods of the delicately beautiful jewelweed. It’s also called the spotted touch-me-not, among its several other names, and is actually a member of the Impatiens family. And we loved to pick bouquets of blue flag iris, or just blue flag as we called them although it too has several other names, not knowing that parts of it (leaves and roots) are actually poisonous. And who doesn’t love summer clover … of any colour? Nature’s perfect dried flower is the pearly everlasting (also western pearly everlasting), and host to the caterpillars of the painted lady butterfly and the American painted lady butterfly. Also something interesting about this pretty flower is that it’s dioecious, and that means the pollen-producing (male) and the seed-producing (female) flowers are borne on separate plants. The ultimate date night.

Among our many wildflowers here in New Brunswick, perhaps the first flowers of spring are the most welcome after a long season of ice and snow. Finding them was always a special thrill for me as a kid. The queen of the New Brunswick spring forests, at least as far as I was concerned, was the purple violet, our province’s official floral emblem since 1936. It was selected at the request of our provincial Women’s Institute, as well as the Lieutenant Governor and the school children of New Brunswick.

If I’d been around I would have voted for it too because I have a long personal history with the purple violet. Growing up I always wanted to give my mother a bouquet of them for Mother’s Day or failing that, her birthday on May 17^th. Of course in the area where I lived they didn’t bloom in time for either occasion, and I think in all those years only once were they ready that early. I even made my own little boxed-in garden and transplanted purple violets there in hopes of earlier arrivals, but to no avail. They bloomed, as always, when they were good and ready, and never in time for the special occasions aforementioned except for that one time. For some reason though, I never gave up hope….

As a kid I spent a great deal of my time alone in the woods, loving the peace and quiet I found there – the opportunity to surround myself with nature. I loved to see the first white violets too, much more heavily perfumed than their purple cousins. They were so tiny they didn’t really lend themselves well to a bouquet, but I picked plenty of them anyway for my mother. A real find was a painted trillium and on really special occasions I’d find a red trillium. Simply gorgeous! I knew not to touch them because they were said to be poisonous, so I just admired them and left them alone. That’s good because it takes those plants something like ten years to produce a blossom.

 

Painted Trillium

         Another spring flower that was not present in the woodlands I was most familiar with was the yellow trout lily. A showy spring flower, I saw them for the first time in the woods around my grandmother’s farm. They grew in profusion down by the brook on the way to the back pasture.

And the amazing pink lady’s slipper is one of our wild orchids. Coming across a patch of these flowers in late June was a very special treat, and again we were always told not to pick them. Like the trillium they are slow flowering and can take upwards of sixteen years to produce a first flower. I would sit for hours and just enjoy these exquisite wildflowers … their elegant beauty.

And then of course as the season mellows into summer and fall in New Brunswick there are wildflowers aplenty in both woodland and meadow, and that love of everything natural found its way into Just Before Sunset. The profusion of wildflowers in the province offers a smorgasbord of artistic possibilities for our watercolourist, Suzanne:

“Peony was now curled up on Suzanne’s office chair sound asleep, so she decided to forego the music she had intended to paint to this afternoon. The cat looked so peaceful it just wouldn’t be right to jar her out of sleep with a rousing Beethoven arrangement. But then she thought, Peony, today is going to be different. We’re having music, baby, hang on, and she slipped in her favourite CD. Peony never budged, and the afternoon passed quickly. Suzanne allowing herself to be transported by the music, the flow of the paint on her soft, flexible brushes and the sumptuous blending of shades as the final wildflower continued to come to life on the canvas.

Each brush stroke seemed to coexist with the exquisite musical notes, the sultry strains of Moonlight Sonata caressing her as she painted, tears streaming down her face. It was not unusual for her to be caught up in the enchanting fusion of art and music; to go to another plane.

She thought of her life, it couldn’t help but overflow into this artistic odyssey, the symbiotic melding of art and life, and she remembered when she and Aiden had created this space for her. Her very own studio, with its profusion of pastels: a symphony of muted yellow, soft blue, powder pink, mint green, lilac, and peach. That’s probably why she loved wildflowers, she mused to herself as she worked, because while nature’s palette also included vibrant greens, reds, purples and sunshine yellows, the gentle side to creation was a rendering of iridescent elegance, like sun-splashed rainbows and the coral blush of sunrise.

Finally, just before five she laid down her brush and stood back. Pearly Everlasting was finished, and while she had left this particular painting until last because she thought it would require less detail, she knew she’d been deceived, as are many who dismiss this hardy yet dainty New Brunswick wildflower. Its subtle, pale shading and exquisitely fine petals did in fact demand an artist’s passion to fully capture its delicate essence on canvas.

And now all five wildflower paintings were complete and she would deliver them to Saint John tomorrow. And she wouldn’t just drop her work off at the gallery as she usually did. No, she would make a day of it in the old port city.”

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