The summer soltice

The summer solstice on June 21 is an annual sun festival, celebrated by few and hardly ever noted in modern calendars.  Occasionally, the solstice is announced on radio as the first day of summer.  The solstice marks the longest day of the year, that is, the day with the greatest number of sunlit hours.  Twenty-first century humans may ignore the date as inconsequential, but plants rely on the sun for seasonal cues; for instance, when to begin and when to end their growing seasons. 

Strawberries receive a signal to begin to grow when the number of hours of sunlight reaches ten.  Spinach, another early spring crop, begins its seasonal activities when sunlight reaches thirteen hours daily.  Spinach needs not only a cool season but also a “short day length.”  By mid-June, spinach has set its seed and is done for the year.  Other plants, such as chrysanthemum, bloom only when daylight hours begin to decrease after long summer days.  Mums, a popular fall flower, bloom with fifteen hours of waning daylight.

Just after the summer solstice, I bring my first flowers to market: five buckets in all.  Two large galvanized buckets hold an array of mixed perennials: delicate chartreuse Lady’s mantel, sharp-scented rue, small daisy-like feverfew, early pink Asiatic lilies.  I plunge herbs into a second bucket, Nepeta, a favorite of cats, has a profusion of tiny lavender flower.  Stems of gray-leafed sage have dropped most of their purple flowers to concentrate on forming sharp-pointed seedpods.  I add pink spirea in various stages of flowering from tiny fuchsia balls to foamy pink blooms, one stem of white bellflowers, and a single late pink peony.  Two paint cans, labels removed and pointed purple, hold yellow snapdragons, green and white zinnias, and green shafts of wheat.  Waxy white flowers of mock orange, a little worse for wear with all the rain, fill the June air with citrus scent, just as they did in the 1930s when these blooms were de rigueur in wedding bouquets.  Old-fashioned pink roses, the kind you bring to the nose and inhale with deep satisfaction, complete the collection.