Every August, in my memory at least, a weather front blows through and with it a short respite from northeast Ohio’s oppressive heat and humidity – little more than a tease of autumn. It always seems to coincide with the time of year I notice some plants going to seed, perhaps because these clement days lure me into the fields and meadows where I find myself among them. At any rate, about five years ago I stumbled upon garlic scapes growing randomly in our front garden. And as beautiful as these allium are in bloom, it’s the period in early-mid August when they dry that fascinates me so. The photograph below was one I took yesterday that seemed worthy of a brief description.
Suspended in first light and a gentle August morning breeze, a desiccated stalk and umbel of a garlic scape sways in a short arc, before returning to plumb. Bulbils, the individual lobes clustered here, unite in high relief against an abstract background of blurred green foliage and a distant pink cone flower. To me it appears to bow its head, not in resignation so much as reverence and possibility; reverence for its own regeneration and potential for rebirth. The notion of perpetual life notwithstanding, there is an elegiac beauty to its temporal existence.
