Hyacinth Hallucinations

One of the great benefits of working at Sun Valley is all the flowers you end up getting to take home. Last Tuesday, after doing a photo shoot with some very fancy Hyacinth in a range of colors (purple, pink and blue) I took home the subjects of the photo-shoot. Hyacinth are a flower that I am still learning the intricacies of, their long rows of bell shaped blossoms, their bright strong presence and of course, their heady fragrance which reminds me of another time or place in my life, which I haven’t yet pinned down. Somehow the smell of a hyacinth has been imprinted on my subconsciousness. I wonder when I had this experience, I think it must have been as a child, but it is somewhere in the floral ether.




Our "Atlantic" Hyacinth

 The power of scent is one of the more hard to control and hard to define elements of our five senses. The memories that can be released by the mere whiff of a flower, a perfume or a seasoning in the kitchen can often catch a person off guard. The scent can also be closer to a “smell” such as stale moldy room that reminds you of a sleep over at your best friend’s house as little child, or that smell of patchouli and burning incense that brings you back to a college dorm room.

I took home these Hyacinths, with the plan to get deep into my own psychology and figure out where buried in my subconscious these memories stemmed from (no pun intended!). In a painful and unfortunate turn of events though, I came down with the flu. Not the sit at home sip on some tea and watch some movies flu, but the, Oh my God. Are my affairs in order? I may not live another day flu.

I was quickly quarantined from the family as my temperature soared. Laid up, confined to bed, no movies, no desire to eat or drink. Just a puddle of suffering as this diabolical flu bug took it's course. In a dark room, aching all through my body, suddenly there was a light as my spouse brought in a pitcher vase full of hyacinths.

“Here, these will make you feel better.”

Their bright color and rich green foliage seemed to perk up the room with their very presence. I watched them with one eye, as it was two painful to have both eyes open at once. What an intricate flower a hyacinth is. There is so much detail to take in, even without a fever, they really have a lot of bang for the buck. The pink especially, is so rich it could be like 60 mini lilies strung up the stem. Our hyacinth reach tall out of the vase, as I wrote about growing them in a recent blog post, I didn’t realize the expertise needed to achieve the results we consistently get.

Currently on my porch, in a pot packed with odd bulbs, and I have some hot pink hyacinth blooming. However, this garden variety of hyacinth doesn’t shine anywhere as bright as Sun Valley hyacinth. The ones growing at my house are blooming at the ground level, and don’t possess nearly as many rows of blooms as Sun Valleys. I am a decent gardener, but it looks like Lane, Antoon and Tim may have greener thumbs than me, although this hot pink color is pretty spicy!



Amateur Hyacinth

I tried to enjoy the smell of the hyacinths and convalesced with some whimpering. I slipped in and out of sweaty fever dreams that now took on a floral twist.  Hallucinating like I hadn’t done in more than a few years; it was a little dicey there for a couple days, luckily the fever finally broke.



 My sanity started to return, and I could move without it hurting. I realized something good had come from my quixotic visions. I had managed to inadvertently figure out where my connection to the hyacinths smell had come from.

Way back in about 7th and 8th grade while living in Rhode Island, I worked at an elaborate farm stand called Schartner Farms. They grow fresh veggies and “pick your own strawberries”, have a yummy bakery and a decent greenhouse complex, where they grow everything from geraniums to tomatoes…and in one of them they were growing hyacinth. Out in Greenhouse 4, a few romances were hatched and an unequal amount of hearts broken. All that time of intrepidation and youthful passion managed to connect itself to the strong fragrance of the hyacinth.

Years later that smell had such a powerful connotation it actually took a fever dream to divine the meaning in that scent.

Yes, flowers have this power.