If I don't figure it out now, there's next year
Ruminating on maple flowers gets me thinking about life, again
I’ve thought these thoughts before, I thought, as I looked at a blooming silver maple at the edge of the Impoundment (a large, shallow lagoon) at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum last week. The twigs of the far-reaching tree were festooned with small clusters of orange blossoms, each with a yellow stamen projecting into the air (these were male flowers, I gather - maples can produce clusters of male and of female flowers). I wondered whether maples really are wind-pollinated. Their flowers seem awful showy to me for a wind-pollinated plant. Take oak flowers, for what I consider to be a typically unassuming, wind-pollinated flower. They dangle a string of tiny, poppy seed-sized green-yellow flowers that look like, well, not much. The fact that a flower is colorful could be a complete coincidence, but showy flowers are usually showy because they have evolved to signal to insects or other pollinators (such as hummingbirds on a grander scale). When a flower relies on the wind, looks don’t matter at all.
It turns out that the pollination of maples is a bit of a mystery. They are generally thought to be wind pollinated, but insects do visit them, so maybe insects do transport pollen from female flowers to male flowers. I’m not the only one who has wondered about maple flowers.
And this wasn’t the first year I’ve wondered about them either. This same sequence of thoughts about maple flower pollination trapezes through my mind every March.
The same emotions do too. The flowering of silver and red maples is one of the great signals of early spring, and it is also one of the most fleeting. One day they’re just little buds on the twigs. Then in early March they’re blooming everywhere, and before you know it there are wee whirlygigs growing out of where the flowers had been. The show is over. Every spring I am excited and then winsome as something beautiful and fascinating slips by.
Spring is full of these marvelous but brief phenomena. Every spring ephemeral wildflower has a short window to produce the next generation. The wood frogs and spotted salamanders breed for a few nights, and then they’re done. The migrating songbirds sweep through, the tree leaves finish growing to complete the forest canopy, and all of the sudden it’s summer.
It’s enough to make a middle aged naturalist think of mortality, of life’s delights and triumphs sweeping by too fast to properly savor them.
I suppose there are two ways to look at spring: linear and circular. If we’re marching along a straight path towards death winter, then it’s easy to get caught up in the sense of loss at not having as much time as you’d like to enjoy everything, so much so that you can’t properly enjoy anything. It’s a self-fulfilling emotional curse.
A circular* perspective could be more comforting. Spring will come again (even if, at some point, I won’t be here to see it). Life is a one-way trip as far as I can tell, but it’s made up of repeating circles, or loops that vary just enough to keep them interesting. I am enjoying maple flowers right now, but I hope this summer I’ll enjoy rosy maple moths, and in the autumn the blazing colors of falling maple leaves. Then the stark beauty of bare maple limbs draped with snow will yield to blossoms all over again, and next March I’ll wonder if maybe insects help move pollen from one maple tree to another.
*I often see circular perceptions of time and life attributed to pre-modern people, or to Eastern cultures, or Indigenous cultures, but in general I’m wary of attributing the way we would rather see the world to “others,” or cherry picking examples that obscure what might be a greater diversity of outlooks. All those idealized “other” people inhabit their worlds in the ways they do for their own reasons, not just to bolster a modern, Western writer’s argument.