Wednesday, September 30, 2009

chicory



Chicory, like the sparrow of my first blog, is said to be alien and invasive. Well it can be ubiqutous. It's a beautiful plant, the blooms of which can range from pale mauves to sky blue. At Lois's community garden last Saturday, very late in the afternoon, chicory were showing a very deep blue bloom. This color is unusual. Maybe the silvery light from the drizzling rain "popped" the color. Unusual also was the time of day of the blooms. Chicory blooms close even by noon often.
Chicory is everywhere around here. It actually likes the dusty ground beside roads. It grows by itself or surrounded in fields. I sketch it often when I'm out. I can forget that the blooms will close, starting with a wide dotting of the blues across the field on my paper or canvas and, oh, six hours later suddenly looking out and wondering about their disappearance.
The blooms open one at a time, my books say. I'm not entirely sure what that means. I've sketched a sprig with one bloom, thinking that I might see a bud open as I sketched but no. In a vase, the blooms' color looks, I think, wan. Spent blooms are milky pinkish, almost milky white. The color has faded. In a vase I suppose the chicory fades fast, like some wildflowers do, even ones that can hold a bloom in hardscrabble places. The bloom here is slightly wan in color.

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