Come Away, Oh Human Child

William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called "The Stolen Child" in which fairies are running around kidnapping children, pestering trout, and stealing cherries.  Loreena McKennit set it to music, and it is quite nice.

The bit about the trout is especially compelling in my book.  The fairies lean out over streams and whisper in their ears to give them "unquiet dreams."  I love that.  Unquiet dreams.

In the Northwest, we call our Erythronium species Trout Lilies, due to the brown markings on their leaves.  They are all quite enchanting- tiny and delicate... fading with the first warm days of summer.  I've been collecting seed and starting them in my garden for a few years.  In time, I hope to have drifts of them to light up my garden in the earliest days of spring.

My friend Janet and I were exploring a couple of populations of one of the Oregon species- Erythronium revolutum.  It is one of the few species that has pink flowers (most of the rest have yellow or white petals), and it has particularly nice brown stripes on the leaves.  During the course of this particular early April day, we looked at thousands upon thousands of them.  There were larger plants with two blossoms per stem- all the way down to first year seedlings that look like baby onions.  They grew by the bazillion in both locations.  Absolutely betwitching.

Oh god.  I'm starting to use garden writer terms- bewitching- enchanting.  The next thing you know, I'll be using alliterative strings of adjectives that make cheese-sensitive readers want to puke.

But it is true...  they are magical little things.  We made plans to head back in the summer to see if we could collect seed.  Tragically, the second population was in a grassy area by a highway, where a lawnmower would destroy the flower stalks before the seed would mature.  There were a few areas among the shrubs that would still be ok, however.

"You know, Janet, I bet somewhere in the middle of these thousands of Erythroniums, there has to be one that is variegated.  Could you imagine the variegation running underneath the brown marks?"

She agreed that this would be spectactular- if a bit far-fetched.

I shit you not.  About five minutes later, as she was taking pictures of some of the largest specimens a few yards away, I looked down.  This was right in front of my feet.  Seriously.

A young plant- maybe only 3 years old or so- was there, showing off its bright yellow variegation.

"Janet.  Come here and look at this."

She kept taking photos.

"Seriously, you need to come look at this."

We both stared at it for moment.

Janet handed me the trowel.  I pushed it into the ground, slicing out a cylinder of soil about three inches in diameter and six inches in height.

I found a nearby discarded softdrink cup and put the precious cylinder of soil in it.

About half-way home, we stopped for snacks at a convenience store.  I looked in the back seat at my treasure.  It was wilting.  I carefully watered it and worried.

I got it home and plunged the cylinder of soil into one of the best beds in my garden.  I placed a clear glass bowl over the plant to limit moisture loss- and shaded it with a piece of corrugated plastic to keep off the sunlight.  (That would have cooked it.)  Even with that treatment, the single leaf of the Erythronium wilted and died a couple of weeks later.

I spent the next year wringing my hands and hovering over that cylinder of soil.  When spring came, the other, typical Erythronium next to it in the cylinder of soil came up and produced a nice, healthy leaf.  I was heartbroken and wracked with guilt for killing this special specimen.  (Yep.  There's that alliteration- grab your barf bags!)

Two weeks later, I was overjoyed to see a lemon-yellow spike of foliage poke through the soil.  The variegated Trout Lily had survived the collection process.

It will be years before you see it on the market- and indeed, you can't really tell how cool it is going to be from that picture.  I have a good feeling about that plant, though.  Great things are in its future.  I decided that I will eventually name it Erythronium revolutum 'Unquiet Dreams', aftter the Yeats poem.  Worrying about whether it had survived gave me plenty of unquiet dreams...  plus, it is a Trout Lily of an otherworldy quality. If there were fairies, I am sure that they would be whispering to this delicate little ephemeral flower.