Flower of the week: Dayflower in shade and sun
They mystery of when things click and when they don't; Jini Reddy's "Wanderland"
One of the flowers I saw on a short trip to Cape Cod was dayflower (Commelina communis)—not a coastal specialty but a widespread introduced species that I happen to love. The name isn’t misleading: the flowers are ephemeral, and finding a patch in bloom feels like a treat. Dayflower is considered invasive in some areas and has even developed resistance to some herbicides. Yet I have trouble mustering any ill-will against a plant that looks like this, to be honest.
When I found this dayflower growing illicitly in a garden patch and started taking pictures, it was in shade. The petals were a moody violet, the leaves cool green, the shrubs and trees in behind providing a dark background. Three seconds later, as recorded in the camera’s metadata, a cloud moved past the sun and the petals gleamed bright blue, the leaves taking on a lemony shade. The light also revealed damage to the flower’s left petal and whitish veins. One might appeal to photographers that appreciate how cloud cover produces smooth, even tones; the other might appeal to people who like the sun.
Which was the authentic experience of the flower? The cool, solid tones at first or the bright, high-contrast look that came seconds after? Or is it some average of these two?
Sometimes it’s inappropriate to average two quantities and pretend that average has any meaning in reality. An ecologist would ask, “Is that average biologically meaningful?” What is the average of these two photos? The flower is either in sun or it’s not. The cat is alive or it’s dead. Sometimes “the middle” has no worthwhile meaning.
Normally I’d use the single best picture I took of a flower for the newsletter, because I don’t want to waste the reader’s time with extraneous stuff. (To the extent that a newsletter isn’t itself extraneous, etc.) This time, by chance, I came away with two images that offer a metaphor for how I experience the natural world: I’m either feeling in sync with it or I’m not. There’s not usually an in-between state where I’m just passively moving through a place without strong feelings about it.
This obviously says more about me than about the natural world. The sun and the flower did not conspire to produce these conditions in Brewster, Massachusetts. The question is what leads me, specifically, to either connect with a particular place and time or not?
I’m not exactly new to taking walks outside, yet I don’t have much insight into why I respond in such divergent ways, why I’m not able to maintain a happy middle course, a reasonable amount of contentment at all times. The only observation I’ll offer—one more about how I react to events than about the general state of the world—is this: experiences of misery and of consolation are often seconds apart. They seem to be on two sides of a coin, and periodically, with apparent randomness, the universe turns the coin over. My job is to be looking when it happens, and respond.
Jini Reddy’s Wanderland and a sense of magic
“And I struggle to keep loneliness at bay – the kind of lonely that keeps the most beautiful things and the most serene settings at arms length, behind an invisible glass wall.”
Jini Reddy’s book Wanderland takes on the question of why some places and outdoor experiences evoke an ecstatic response in her and others don’t. She pursues magical experiences with nature, ones that go beyond the excitement of physical exercise into something more holistic, connecting somehow with a place’s unique energy: “a childlike intensity of experience.”
Whether or not we’re able to describe it so cogently, this is what many of us hope for on a weekend hike. What Reddy has done is carefully and cleverly unpack the mental processes, physical activities, and particular landscapes that lead her to a sense of the magical—mapping her way from the ordinary to somewhere else. Reddy, a travel writer for many years, brings a wry sense of humor to chasing this mystery. She’s the first writer of color to have a book shortlisted for the UK’s Wainwright Prize, an honor that speaks to the book’s unconventional and fruitful approach.
“I can enter into an altered relationship with the landscape in a single footstep,” Reddy observes. Yet she also writes about the many times when she wants to step into an altered relationship but the door seems closed. Challenges to reaching this connection come internally, from her own mental blocks and intrusive memories, but also from being a woman of color in majority-white places in the UK. People stare broadly at her in the country “like a painting in the gallery.” As a result, she often seeks out less-obvious landscapes: a planted labyrinth, a hidden spring in a nature preserve, green spaces at the fringes of cities. “I’ll make the outlier world my home,” she writes. By tracing her routes from frustration to relief and revelation, Reddy offers stories that suggest how we might seek out the wondrous for ourselves and that are somehow practical, sensitive, and hilarious all at once.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.