Every spring I find a few of these flowers growing near one of the old bridges on the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses land owned by Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge along the Mousam River. I can’t identify it. It looks so familiar, so like I ought to know its name. Again today, I have spent way too long looking…in my wildflower guides and on-line, but it eludes me yet…once more. I suspect it is closely related to Canada Mayflower and False Lily of the Valley, though it is not either of those. Canada May Flower grows further down the path in the more shaded areas, and the leaves are the wrong shape for False Lily of the Valley. There are a lot of flowery bushes right along there, including Barbarry, which I know is not native, so I have come to suspect it might be a garden flower left over from when the Path, which was, in fact, a trolley line connecting Kennebunk proper with Kennebunk Port at the turn of the century, was landscaped. But which one?

No matter what it is called, I love the delicate white flowers and the strong bold curves of the veined leaves, especially as they are shown off here in the spring sun. The sunlit brush in the background is, I think, just far enough out of focus to provide framing and balance for the strong leaves in the foreground, and the slightly radial lines of the dry plant stems actually draw the eye downward to the flower at the center. This is a ground level shot. I have a slightly tighter framing that focuses more on the flowers, but I really like what the light is doing in the lines of the leaves.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.  24mm macro, plus 1.5x digital tel-extender for the field of view of a 36mm lens, f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125.

Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. 

And for the Sunday thought. I am not sure why it bothers me so much to have to post this beauty without a name. The flower is beautiful. The image is strong. It needs, I think, no apology. It is a thing of beauty in itself, whole. A name would not make it any better, or even any more complete. And yet, there is a vague sense that I am failing in my duty when I publish it without a name attached. And that is it exactly. I am not feeling ashamed at my ignorance, or my lack of diligence. We can’t know everything, and I have spent a reasonable (some would say unreasonable) amount of time trying to find out. And yet I do feel that it is part of my job as one who celebrates the creator’s creation to supply the name we humans have given this plant. As though that mattered. Strange.

I was thinking about language this week (probably in the shower where all my deep thinking takes place…I think the quality of thought in the world may have diminished in direct proportion to the conversion from bath-taking to shower-taking 🙂 Words are really just our way of indexing experience and memory. When I say “Canada Mayflower” I instantly tap into a whole complex of connected memory and experience stored somewhere in the biologic cloud that is my brain, and going back in time to my earliest experiences. And now, today,  it is so easy to type that name into the browser of my computer, and be instantly connected to the vast web of human memory and experience that resides in the digital cloud that spans the world, and reaches infinitely further back into time than I can go myself. But the words themselves, “Canada Mayflower” are just the index key that pulls all that information together. It is the way our minds work. It is the way we humans work.

Which is way I always smile when I remember that, according to the story that comes along with my faith, our first job was to name the animals (and presumably the plants, and even the rocks, too). It is our most inherent duty. And this is good, because the other aspect of the job is caring. We were to care for creation as well as name it. They are deeply linked in the way we are made. Both logic and faith tell me this is so.

This is a beautiful flower, I think, beautifully framed to share with you. But I still have the vague feeling that if I don’t care enough to know beauty’s name, then I do not care enough.

Happy Sunday.