It has been a very long winter here in Devon. So long that I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m trying to navigate my days through new flowers I’ve spotted opening, instead of dwelling on the unending rain and rare glimpses of sun. I saw fritillaries today, a whole field of them. My friend in Canada tells me that in the far north of the Okanagan where she grew up, fritillaries were always the promise that spring really was arriving, and she knows winters far more severe and wild than this one, with feet of snow blocking the door and mountain lions coming near the house in the cold.
So, the fritillaries say, it’s really happening. We know way more about spring than you do, woman, and we are here to tell you we’ve arrived exactly on time. I am doing my best to trust them.
Meanwhile, in order to give myself (and all of us) a bit of additional hope, a bit of sap rising up the trunk, a bit of budding promise, I want to share some thoughts about bud scales, and then a poetic piece about their dreaming up the sap and bark of winter-turning-to-spring trees, that I originally wrote for a writing class of mine two Januarys ago, and have since reworked.
The Bud Scale
a small essay
Imagine that you are walking in a late winter fruit orchard. There are apples and quince, plums, pears and apricots. Winter has been overlong, and deep, and all the branches are bare and silver, so that their architecture, so like our neural pathways, is vivid against the sky. Below ground, that architecture is mirrored by the roots. Nothing stirs. The trees are sleeping in quiet dormancy. The roots are gathering minerals from the deep. They do so in a dream-like manner. But the days are getting lighter now. We have tipped from the solstice’s still threshold into the lengthening of the light, and with it, the steady development of flower buds within the treess bodies. In winter they are out of sight, but perfectly timed to listen to patterns of light and warmth in the outer world.
All nascent buds and leaves are protected by bud scales, which form like little furred caps at the end of branch-tips after the last leaves have fallen in autumn. They serve a protective purpose, to shield embryonic growth from injury due to cold temperatures or rough weather. Not only do they physically blanket the branch-tips where all new life is brewing—like scales on the body of a snake— the bud scales are also the site of creation of a plant hormone called abscisic acid (ABA).
Abscisic acid gathers and forms in these scales and then moves slowly down the body of the tree by gravity, sending a message all throughout the tree’s body that tells the tree to stop growing, to rest and wait for spring. Cold temperatures and low light keep this hormone brewing in the bud scales and circulating throughout the tree, protecting it from budding too early with a false December or January warmth. Only when sufficient UV rays combined with a certain amount of cold hours have dissolved most of the abscisic acid will the tree safely break from dormancy and begin to leaf and bud.
There is something about walking among silver-branched fruit trees in a winter orchard that has always felt particularly restful to me. Now I wonder if it is not simply their stark and quiet beauty, but also this humming communication of rest that is lettering its way through the trees’ limbs all through the darkest months, that I am feeling when I savor a winter orchard. This blessed and protective language of hormone, light and cold that is spoken back and forth between tree, earth and sky. It is working to guard what is most sacred inside the tree until the time is right for blossoming.
The tree cannot override the communications of these bud scales. The tree cannot deny or resist them. Climate change may affect when dormancy is broken, but this is triggered not by the tree’s insistence. It is triggered only by the tree’s communication with the elements and the season’s messages, an intelligence that works from the outside in, and then the inside out.
It is a beautiful dance — what is forming in the tree’s interior, and the wisdom that communicates from the tree’s exterior, keeping everything at rest long enough to fully nourish the buds and leaves being made.
I am put in mind of the stories of sleeping maidens— mainly Sleeping Beauty, but also Snow White and even Psyche and Eros. What if that enspelled rest was not a curse but in fact an earthen intelligence? What if inside the briar-hedge, the Sleeping Beauty is a tree, and she is dreaming all the beauty of the coming year, and no Prince will get through that hedge until she is ready to wake up anyway? What if she is the remnant of a powerful dreaming cult, among those who read their oracles, and took the pattern of their lives and even their language, from the speaking leaves of trees?
The Bud’s Hypogeum*
a prose poemIn the trunk of me there is a dreaming. Whorled cell, egg before the egg, the seed’s seed.
Winter rain seeps up and in, balancing what has spilled. The open throat of buds, that nucleus: I am, and I am filling.
The rain is iridescent, ultraviolet: the light bees see at the flower-tongue’s root.
Before ever I opened the root of myself—the one that sings iridescently into earth and knows the weathers of tilt, tilth, and change, the one who has ached quietly during the times I stopped singing— back then when I was young and virgin, I created an experiment for my biology class in which I watched bees coming and going from rosemary flowers. I wanted to test what colors they saw. I made no successful scientific conclusions, but I sat for hours in front of the bush and touched their seeing with my seeing. I saw their dance.
It was a long ago beginning.
In the trunk of me there is a dreaming. Before flowering, this nucleus of the bud, this deep drink from up the earth, from the wettest, softest part of the sky. This balancing. Not a flood, nor any longer the seasick barque of letting go and letting go and letting go. Now it is like this: rain falls into a hot-spring where a volcano once was. There is steam when they touch: sky water touches earth water.
There is the cell fed on manna, liquid as what bees see, turning the way celestial objects turn: steadily, slowly, without haste and without concern. There is gold dust; pollen thickness, a showering of heavy-hot karat coins.
All this is gathering at the trunk of me. Where the bark turns to root, spreading out and down. Just there, above the root’s seat, where earth covers like a quilt: here is where the tree dreams the cells that will be buds, all before winter’s end, all before anything moves in the branches.
In darkest night: here is made all that can be, all that will be, all that is peace, all that is pregnancy, all that is fruit.
Steady on, steady on, steady on, counsels the deep at the trunk’s seat.
When I was young and virgin, I closed my eyes in a hammock in the mountains above Lake Tahoe and saw the doorway there in a tree that rose out of water. I stepped down into a chamber inside the burl. It was lined with books. Their pages were gold leaf. Their pages were the words of making. Their pages were the becoming song. An alphabet inside the tree, letters kept by Caryatides.
There is no truer place. There is no greater power than the moment stood inside. Not yesterday’s or tomorrow’s, but the one of this.
The apple tree is dreaming buds, writing the nucleus, singing the water there: o softness, o balancing surrender. A moment like — it rained, the sunrise begin in pink, the robin called and opened my throat.
It is a mitochondrial rejuvenation. The cells are being made to dream of peace: the peace that makes the blossom fruit. It cannot be sung of just once but again and again, every turning, every dawn. Isn’t that what birds know, and therefore bees? We need this chanting back to rights.
I turned around and painted my way back out, finally. I had been so long in the dark. My paint is softest pink, how buds start. Now, in this hypogeum, like the great women of Malta who dreamed to heal beneath the earth, cheeks on stone, among the dead, in sandstone chambers carved with a thousand dots and rings — rain meet water— we dream. It takes a long time.
In the dreaming, at last, someone says: turn away from the shed skin. It is humus now. Fritillaries are coming, wearing new ones.
Look to — here is what kissed her, the one behind briars, all flushing-sweet awake.
Aphrodite went down to the foaming sea to make her virginity new.
That was some kiss.
Flowering, we dream of flowering, months before the flowering: this the place of bud’s potentiality, this the moment’s lettered heart.
I am, and I am filling.
And then suddenly, at last, on the apple tree one day out of rain, the opening begins. What was dreamt all winter, what was kept very safe, surges everywhere. Risks everything. The bud scales break open like eggs, and soon there will be petals. Right here, right here, right here, the earth and sky agree.
© Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2021 and 2023
As a post-script, I hear Gordon Lightfoot singing Come to the door, my pretty one, put on your rings and precious things, in this long-time favorite song of mine, like his beloved is an apple tree, and he’s coming to wake her at last. Tonight, although it’s pouring rain, I insist on hearing spring returning in every line, climbing my windows and walls.
Beautiful. And this – wise: 'What if that enspelled rest was not a curse but in fact an earthen intelligence?' Thank you.
This was a gorgeous read. I also love walking through orchards during winter. That stillness actually make me feel even more alive sometimes, because of the potentiality and the ripe fruit to come on the other side, in spring. Adore your work :)