Timing

For years, I refused to wear a watch.

"Time is a human construct," I'd tell anyone who asked. "Do the trees care if it is ten o'clock? Will the flowers wilt if they know it's five past dinner time?"

The truth is, nature has an inbred clock, and flowers are the timepiece, with a mechanism as precise as quartz or chips. The great name-obsessed botanist, Carolus Linnaeus, described a flower clock — a horologium florae — made by arranging plants in a circular bed according to when their blooms opened and closed. He wasn't the first. A hundred years earlier, the British poet Andrew Marvell wrote of a garden that "computes its time as well as we." Obviously, this is not a new idea. If the ancient wall-painters of Lascaux had been gardeners instead of hunters, I suspect there would have been a wildflower clock daubed on the cave walls, too.

Although Linnaeus discusses the horologium florae in detail in his Philosophia Botanica, published in 1751, the jury is out as to whether he ever actually grew such a clock. To get a full day's sweep of time, some argue, a flower clock would have to include more than a few rare and scrubby plants. It would not be a thing of utility, not of beauty, no different from any digital alarm.

So how would I construct my own horologium florae? I would start with goatsbeard, which opens at three a.m., an hour that is neither morning nor night. At four, the rough hawkbit opens to the first light, a hairy native that I see along the roadsides when I take my morning run, its orange flowers bobbing on tall spindy stems. At five, the dandelion spreads its petals and so does the blue chicory, which is prettier. At six, pulmonaria. At seven, red hawsbeard, which looks an awful lot like a hawkbit. Eight o'oclock is a problem, but at nine maybe a dianthus or a malva, I'd have to check. At ten, according to Linnaeus's list, garden lettuce opens. That seems odd. A clock with lettuce flowers as a marker would be good only for a week in August. The middle of the day is a puzzle, too, one that resolves itself as the light wanes. Calendula closes at 3, sweet alyssum at 4, Icelandic poppy at 7, day lilies at 8, and at 9, if it's getting dark, the petals of the moonflower start to unfurl.

But what if it's raining? What if the clouds are hanging low? What if it's September instead of June. Nature may be precise, but it's contingent.

In the Philosophia Botanica, Linnaeus defines three kinds of flowers: those that, like oxalis and Japanees peonies, vary their opening and closing times with the weather (the Meteorici); those that, like the misnamed four o'clock, change their habits according to the length of the day (the Tropici) and those that are true-blue timekeepers, the hawbits and dandelions, steadfast in their habits, never varying, no matter what, the moment when their petals unfurl. These are the Aequinoctales, the only flowers Linnaeus allowed in his clock.

At The Leaf, we're more accommodating.

"The oxalis are folding up their leaves," I say to my Beloved. "I'd better start supper."

"Not yet," he replies. "The four o'clocks are opening. It's happy hour."

The garden is not only clock, it is calendar, too. I don't have to open iCal to know that spring is over, summer has begun. The columbines are fading. The tulip leaves have wilted; the bulbs willingly let go their stalks. The ground under the late Preston lilac is pale with mauve confetti. The forget-me-nots are a haze of propagating grey. The first planting of lettuce has grown tough and been fed to the chickens. The blue fescue has gone to seed. The Farmer is taking off his first cut of hay. The strawberries are ripening, the peas are flowering, the chamomile is ready to pick. The peonies are heavy on their bushes, and this morning, the first bloom opened on the Harrison's Yellow, a rose the Rosarian gave me because it is almost as old as our house. It was discovered, he told me, on a farm on Manhattan before skyscrapers spread over that island like tall, bristling weeds. Harrison's Yellow is the sunny little rose that pioneer women dug up and took west, the history of American settlement told in a trail of roses, just the story of early Canada can be read in the lilacs clustered for what seems now like no good reason at the edge of abandoned fields: flowers marking time in centuries.

Lately a subtle colour shift has been underway in the garden, from the soft pinks and mauves and shades of white of early spring to the hot poppies, neon-blue Siberian irises, and day-glo lilies of summer. Delicate chartreuse leaves, translucent as the lime Life Savers I used to suck to a sliver, are giving way to tougher, shinier, hairier greens and silver-greys designed to reflect the light and hold the moisture through the parched dog days of July.

In a garden, even in June, you can see the seeds of its end.

Maybe that's why digging in the dirt is not a young person's sport. People come to it, my sister the Therapist and I agree, at the same time they come to the psychotherapist's sofa: when they reach the halfway point, when the number of years that stretch ahead is no more than what's behind. The summer solstice of a life.

A glimpse of the end turns the mind to beginnings. To starting plants that can be brought through their cycle, seed to flower to seed, this year, and next year, and the year after that, the great life-measuring clock brought under some small control.

"What would you say to just one more garden?" I ask my Beloved on the first day of summer. "Perhaps a flower clock . . ."