In Search of Lost Roses

As Stephen and I pulled into the parking lot of our favorite nursery on a recent Saturday afternoon-we were here to buy mulch-I felt a stab of regret that it was not the ‘Month of Mary,’ followed by a second stab of regret that we were not walking through the countryside of France (followed by a third that it was 2009 and a fourth that ____).

All of these regrets were triggered by the sight of the name ‘Hawthorne’ on the exit sign of the Saw Mill River Parkway. In addition to being the site of the nursery, it (i.e., the hawthorn, albeit without the extra ‘e’) plays a pivotal role in Swann’s Way, the first volume of the larger work by Marcel Proust I have recently been reading in the newish translation by Lydia Davis. Specifically, the narrator first glimpses Gilberte Swann, who later becomes the focus of his first obsessive crush, through a hedge of hawthorns.

Before attending to the mulch, we strolled through the grounds of the nursery. Where only months earlier there had been rows and rows of lush, preening trees and perennials, there were now large swaths of empty gravel.

A cedar tree seemed particularly forlorn, tilted at such a strange angle in its root ball.

I even felt sorry for an espaliered juniper, which is probably the lowliest of all conifers for its prevalence in the medians of suburban parking lots and gas stations.

I morosely wondered if I had reached an age when I could identify with these aimless, ill-fated plants and post-Halloween pumpkins.

My mood improved as I returned to the center of the nursery, where a stunning array of trees stood clumped together, perhaps to endure the winter like the penguins in that popular movie from a few hundred years ago. Although there were no hawthorns to be found, the brilliant red fruit of the zumi crabapple tree more than consoled me.

As did the orange berries of a nearby firethorn, which in fact is in the same family (Rosaceae) as the hawthorn (and not surprisingly, the rose.)

The cotoneaster is also in the rose family, and its lovely red berries never fail to charm me.

The purple beautyberry (Callicarpa dichotoma) is not in the rose family, however, and the bubble-gum tone of its fruit left me a bit nauseated.

Stepping back to admire the flaming leaves of a dwarf fothergilla, I realized that there was no pink to be found, and for a moment-returning to Proust-I again wished it could be spring, just so I could experience firsthand the power of his description. As he writes of the pink hawthorn blooms in May (translated so perfectly by Davis), ‘these flowers had chosen precisely the color of an edible thing, or of a delicate embellishment to an outfit for an important holiday, one of those colors which, because they offer children the reason for their superiority, seem most obviously beautiful to the eyes of children, and for that reason will always seem more vivid and more natural to them than the other tints…’

But with the mulch purchased and loaded into the car, it was time to return to the city. As we pulled back onto the highway, I admired a stand of dawn redwoods-the needles russet in the November sun-and felt actually relieved that spring was still many months away.

Previously: City Island

Matthew Gallaway is a writer who lives in Washington Heights. His first novel, ‘The Metropolis Case,’ will be published in 2010 by Crown.