Queen of the Southern Garden

It’s July 18, but there’s  more than a calendar date to tell me the middle of summer is here with all its furnace-like heat and humidity. There are also summer’s uniquely timeless and mood-evoking memories.   For me here in South Carolina there are two things that most predictably  take me back to summers past, besides vacations at the beach.  First, and arguably foremost, are the brilliant red blooms that cover our crape myrtle trees this time of year, and the second is the rhythmic drone of cicadas in the trees.

In this essay I’ll discuss crape myrtles, sometimes called “the Queen of the Southern Garden”, and rightly so.  They are drought tolerant and are everywhere in our city.  They reached peak bloom two weeks ago, and by that ai mean all the trees were literally covered with red, pink, purple or white blooms. It’s an amazing sight to come upon, especially on a bright day when the sun seems to illuminate them and produce a ball of color.

You know how it is in the springtime when the flowering fruit trees, such as apple, cherry delight us with white and  pink blooms?  But this  seems normal.  It’s Spring after all. But crape myrtles wait until spring is long past to give us their showy gifts of color.  Unlike the similarly beautiful, but lower to the ground oleanders, the crapes can tower up to 20 or 30 feet.  The three, white-blossomed trees in our garden rise above the roof, which is three stories, including the attic.  I can look out my hall windows and see the flowers in pockets  across the tops of the trees, bending and swaying in the breeze..

I remember well that crape myrtles lined almost all the streets inNew Orleans where I grew up.  They were as common as live oaks.

This is something I wrote about them in an OD entry going back to August 2002:

Along the streets of Charleston  as I walk on my lunch hour break, I pass all over our city.  They fill the streets of New Orleans and other Southern cities as well.  I have been well acquainted with them since childhood.  They are as distinctive a part of summer as fresh produce and summer flower gardens.  They seem to be perpetually in bloom, and that is why they are so popular.   They are welcome splashes of color everywhere.

 And I also recorded this:

The side garden is “our” space where we walk under tall crape  myrtle trees whose leaves cast sun-dappled shadows on the brick walkways.

The  other morning as I walked through the garden to my car on the way to work, I passed under a tall crepe myrtle which was full of small sparrows chirping with such happiness and delight that I was immediately drawn into the midst of that sound and swept up for mere seconds in a tiny, fleeting epiphany.  And that  was that life is good and beautiful.  It  was as if a sunbeam had suddenly emerged from the clouds and illuminated my path.

 So here’s to the crape myrtle and summer memories when times were considerably more carefree than now.