Flower for the Day Dames Rocket 5-13-24

Dames Rocket (Hesperis matronal) is a long time favorite. It has numerous common names, including dame's rocket, damask-violet, dame's-violet, dames-wort, dame's gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen's gilliflower, rogue's gilliflower, sweet rocket, and mother-of-the-evening.

I love that it shows up in many unexpected places.

It will stay there for several years and then show up in other places. This is described by formalists

as having "escaped from cultivation" but that is the fun of gardening. Plants show up where they can live

successfully  and not where we want them to grow. The plentiful, fragrant flowers are produced in large, showy, terminal racemes that can be very tall and elongate as the flowers of the inflorescence bloom. Each flower is large with four petals. Mine have always been pink-purple.

Dame's Rocket

 

 

She arrives in the water

that runs off our roof

in this hard rain.  The sound

boils up inside so that

 

I can feel it in her back

before I hear her laughing,

like grapes each laugh,

like bulbs of lung that send

 

air out and clench the new

with joy and comprehension.

In my arms, rain becomes

her universe rising into sense.

 

The dame's rockets hum

sweet summer nights,

their petal claws and corollas

purple along rails and in thickets.

 

Brought here from Europe

long ago, this is their home now,

just like us, mothers and daughters

back to the first ones born

 

in bluebells of wilderness

and close rain that infuses all.

My cells' energy is hers

and will be in her children, too,

 

an atlas to the past like chains

of ferns with fronds,

fiddleheads, and sori

underneath for the next of us.

Angie Macri