GARDENS:Flower buds are nature's promise of good things to come - and their infinite variety can be a source of endless fascination, writes Jane Powers.
WE GARDENERS ARE always going on about the sculptural beauty of seedheads in autumn and winter. And in recent years, it has become fashionable to leave gaunt plant skeletons standing in the borders, for frost to garnish, and for birds to feast upon. (I have to admit to subscribing to this idea myself.) Our eyes are well opened-up to the delights at the tail end of the season. But there's a much earlier part of a plant's cycle that makes me go weak at the knees. Flower buds.
Flower buds fill me with ludicrous amounts of excitement. Much of the thrill resides in the sense of anticipation. A plump and healthy bud, with the petals all neatly folded and rolled and pleated inside, is a perfect promise of good things to come. But it invokes much more than this; the infant flower has the same power over me (and other gardeners too, no doubt) as a wide-eyed puppy or a newly-hatched chick. The ready-to-pop bud is so fresh, hopeful and vulnerable that my wiry old heart becomes unexpectedly flooded with protective warmth.
I know it sounds completely fanciful, or daft (and, yes, even pretentious), but some buds seem to have personalities of their own - and they don't necessarily match those of the adult flower. Take tulips. The fully-hatched bloom is a showy, show-off goblet of a flower, but the bud, particularly in the miniature species varieties, is a prim little egg, with a self-contained smile along its length (not unlike that worn by the flesh-eating plant in Mr Mushnik's flower shop in the film Little Shop of Horrors - which makes it especially engaging).
Right now, the tiny tulip 'Little Beauty' is sitting all smug and poised to open in my small alpine bed, and I like to take frequent trips down the back steps to admire its expectant buds.
Nearby, a pulsatilla, also know as the Pasque flower, is likewise about to spread its wings. When fully open, the fluttery petals cradle the golden bosses of stamens at their centre. Yet in the bud stage, they are tightly clasped into a solid nub, and protected by an upstanding, filigreed collar of finely-cut, hairy bracts, which makes them spectacularly ornate.
Pulsatillas belong to the Ranunculaceae family, a clan that is especially blessed in the bud department. Its members include delphinium and aconitum, with their shiny, slightly evil-looking, insect-larva-like flowers-in-waiting; clematis, with its miniature tennis ball buds (very noticeable on C. montana, in bloom now); and hellebores, whose ovoid, embryonic flowers shelter from the weather behind their already-opened brethren, in a "you-go-first-I'm-right-behind-you" kind of posture. The family also gives us the trollius, or globe flower, whose uplifted, many-petalled, yellow orbs are preceded by greeny-yellow lollipops.
One of the most appealing arrangements for flower buds is that of the ball-on-a-stick, such as the trollius. A fantastically otherworldly individual in this category is Echinops, or globe thistle, which hoists up spiny, silvery spheres, each one a complex masterpiece of geometry. When lit from behind, they shimmer around their spiky edges, like cosmic bodies travelling through space. The tiny flowers, when they come, erupt first from the top, in a burst of blue fireworks.
Some of the best balls on sticks, both in the pregnant and post-partum stages, are the alliums, or onions. The popular (and deservedly so) A. hollandicum 'Purple Sensation' and the other large-flowered alliums are magical indeed, producing blooms that range in size from snooker ball to football, each packed in an orderly fashion into a receptacle that may be no larger than your thumb.
Leeks and edible onions also have interesting buds: if they start to bolt in the vegetable garden, you can let them flower (and attract nectar-drinking insects), or you can cut them and bring them into the house, where they will happily live in a vase of water for several weeks, as they complete their journey from bud to flower to seedhead.
The texture of the allium bud's covering,
just before it breaks, is that of a fine skin - an onion skin, not surprisingly. Papery wrappings such as these are nostalgic for those of us who are old enough to remember when all good things in life came encased in lumpy brown packages.
Bearded irises, for instance, are swaddled in exquisitely crumpled, brown paper, of exactly the same fragile weight and pale tone as that which, in the past, bakers used when wrapping loaves of bread. And the yellow asphodel (Asphodeline lutea), which has spires of acidic stars borne over grassy foliage in April and May, protects its flowers with parchmenty, buff-coloured bracts, each one with a carefully drawn dark line along the middle.
The South African dierama, also known as wand flower and angel's fishing rod, is another gift-wrapped special. Its epidermis starts out as your regulation brown parcel covering, but, a day or two before the petals unfurl, it metamorphoses into cellophane. Nature is full of unexpected tricks.
Speaking of tricks, that enormous- handkerchief-out-of-nowhere stunt (beloved of beginner magicians) is matched in the floral world by poppies. Oriental poppies are the most accomplished performers, shaking out vast blowsy blooms of crumpled crepe from pea-green, whiskery capsules, carried on snaking, pipe-cleaner stems.
The annual opium poppy is almost as dramatic, while the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, is a fastidious character, keeping its silky petals tidily rolled inside its buds, so that they emerge without a crease, unlike the rest of the family's flowers, which come out chaotically wrinkled.
There are hundreds of other plants where the buds are as delightful as the fully-fledged flower: dahlias come from shiny, beetle-buds; borage family members emanate from spiralling inflorescences with the youngest buds tucked cosily and safely into the centre of the coil; peonies burst forth from solid ball-bearings; and the expanding flowers of the posh nasturtium relative from Chile and Argentina, Tropaeolum polyphyllum, are like an origami project, with angular calyces and beautifully folded petals.
Even the worst scourge of my garden, bindweed - which mounts an attack from the edges of our boundary every year - has nicely pleated, well-groomed buds. Quite dainty. But perhaps I should stop right there. When a gardener finds herself entranced by one of the most pernicious weeds given to Irish soil, it's time to wake up and get on with it.