131. Old gold: The gift that kept on giving

Until it didn't.

Mar 02, 2024

sand dunes — Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash

With so much going on at the moment I’ve dug deep into my archive to bring you an updated version of one of my Art & Treasures 🖼️ posts from this time last year: ‘The gift that kept on giving’.

I feel the bright pink cyclamen featured in this post counteracts both the wintry grey I’d brought you last week and the weather which the UK is having to accept in these first days of meteorological spring. Here’s a shot from my bedroom window this morning, in case you’re wondering what passes for early March weather around here:

As always, thank you so much for reading.

Rebecca

The gift that kept on giving - until it didn’t

A while after I’d boomeranged back into my parents’ home due to illness I found myself aged 26 and out of the loop in terms of relationships with my own friends.

So for my first Christmas back in the outside world I was immensely touched with the gift of a tiny pink cyclamen from Julia, a friend of Mum’s.

It was not one of those big-bloomed hybrids which you can buy as a houseplant: this was a small-featured, delicate plant which had been sold in a tray with eleven other specimens, each in a little black pot, intended to naturalise in an informal garden setting. Julia had spread the gifts around her friends in Mum’s spinning group, and there had been one for me.

Naturalised cyclamen in my parents’ garden, February 2023.

My new friend naturalised on my windowsill, not in the garden. No, on a succession of windowsills, because once my boomerang years were finally accomplished I again moved out of home and into my own four walls.

From 2001 until 2022 I can scarcely remember a week in which this plucky plant hadn’t had a flower in bloom: it just kept going, spreading positive pink-petalled power from its vantage point between me and the world outside my window.

Colour sketches in my tiny notebook (yes, one is upside down - I like to work on the right-hand page, so once I'd done my first sketch I turned the book the other way up).

A few years into its life it began to struggle, and in a panic I consulted a greener-fingered member of the family. ‘The tuber has reached the limits of its tiny pot, look!’ I was told. ‘It needs more room.’

Duly rehomed into larger quarters my fine-stemmed friend again began to flourish, and every year I gifted it some summer respite outside the kitchen door amongst the higgledy-piggledy pots of rampant mint and tarragon.

That first time outside, its new-season salad bar of juicy leaves was too tempting for the rowdy rabble of spring-fledged starlings, and it was a day or three before I even noticed. In a belated effort to protect Julia’s cyclamen from the hungry bullies I wedged the little pot behind two others. The shredded leaves grew back: my friend was going to be fine.

black and white bird on brown and gray stone — Young starlings, halfway to getting their full adult plumage. Photo by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash

In the heatwave of June 2022, the first of two that exceptional British summer, we found we needed to replace the kitchen door. On the day of the job we moved some pots down the garden to clear some space for the contractors to work in, and that evening were admiring the view across the parched lawn through a glazed door that actually closed properly.

The second heatwave came along in July, scorching the grass further and putting paid to any dreams we might have had of harvesting any runner beans. This weather was something else! Every now and again I’d give the few pots that we’d put back outside the new door a drink, careful always to do it when the sun was off them.

Image taken from carbonbrief.org, Monday July 15th 2022.

Towards the end of the summer I needed a couple of handfuls of mint for a recipe. Opening the back door I was surprised not to see its pot, and asked Jim where it might be.

‘Oh, it’s still with some of the other little pots halfway down the garden. We can move them back now.’

Reader, I was horrified. I’d taken my eye off the ball.

Now, mint is very difficult to kill: the prolonged summer drought hadn’t beaten this doughtiest of herbs. But behind the mint’s temporary billet we found a little black plastic pot containing the dried-out tuber of Julia’s cyclamen, shootless, rootless and almost indistinguishable from the dark compost on which it sat. Next to it was a bigger pot which had contained a bigger, hybrid cyclamen I’d been given the previous autumn: its huge white flowers had been lovely, but were a flash in the pan. The thing had flowered once, not like its elder and much more consistent pink cousin. And now its own disc-like tuber looked as hopeless as Julia’s.

We moved the pots back to where they belonged, outside the kitchen door.

I rang my horticultural helpline1 for more advice. ‘Don’t worry, darling – cyclamen are dormant in the summer. They might rally later, you’ll see.’

Cyclamen are extraordinary. Outside, looking dead to the world for part of the year, come autumn these brave little tubers send up their new shoots, with flower stems appearing before even a single leaf.

I love how the very narrow flower stems with their tightly-furled buds find their way out of the ground before the leaves do.

Mindful of their snoozy lifestyle, and taking good care to keep both pots watered, I examined the tubers daily for any signs of life.

There was a shoot! And another!

The OTHER cyclamen, hanging on by a thread and three leaves. Reader, this is the one which made it.

On the white one. The blowsy hybrid showed its first signs of new life right at the end of the year, but by then just a dried-out husk, Julia’s cyclamen had already given all it had to give.

😢

Julia’s empty pot remained outside the back door until spring, when tiny shoots of self-seeded landcress began at last to take over the compost. In its neighbouring pot the white hybrid kept going, and instead of welcoming it back inside I planted it out into a corner of the front garden in a spot where I wouldn’t be reminded of my carelessness on a daily basis.

My friend the pink cyclamen had been so special. Julia’s gift at such a difficult time all those years ago had reminded me that hey, I was going to be okay.

And although the plant is long gone, by golly it had done its job for over twenty years.

Thank you, Julia.

Love,

Rebecca