Sketch of Weeping Crabapple

With the swarms of buttercups, peach blossoms and hawthorn, vibrant, he would forget each spring the quieted beauty of the weeping crab until she bloomed in her bustles at the head of the drive, hunter and dusty rose, stunning, the glance from beneath the tilt of her parasol.

Sketch of William and a Fern

Poured into a thimble, William’s knowledge of plant life would fill so very little of the thumb cap, it could be placed onto the back of an anxious mule and carried over the roughest of terrains without a single droplet lost to spillage, such would be the headroom. 

     All flowers, William classified by their shape, as a sort of Daisy, Lilly or Rose, depending on which the blossom most closely resembled. Evergreen or deciduous, trees were simply trees. Whatever crept was ivy and whatever sprung from pasture or lawn was grass, be it clover or Timothy. 

     It was a deliberate thing, William’s lack of plant knowledge. Oh, he would have liked to spout off in Latin the names of each and every bit of flora he encountered. He would also like to be able to verbally show his appreciation for a good wine as well, and point out by name even the more minor constellations. But according to William, there was only so much time in the day and space in one’s head. He had to work for a living. ‘Let’s see how much a botanist knows about the transmission of a ’76 MG,’ he would say to himself when the discussion arose, which it quite frequently did. 

     William was a mechanic. Vehicles were what he knew, were what the space in his brain was reserved for. Perhaps when he retired he’d be able to carry with him a plants-at-a glance book, know-your-stars, your wine. Until then, everything was a sort of Daisy a Lilly or a Rose; a Port or Sherry, the Big Dipper. And William, for the more part, was good with that. 

     What he was not so ‘good’ with, were the papers referring to him as a mechanic and amateur plant enthusiasts, after his discovery of a fern thought to have been extinct since before the dinosaurs roamed. It wasn’t true. And while William was fine with being ignorant of some things, a deliberate lie, he was not.

  

‘The Parkinson’s brain,’ the woman on the radio explained, ‘wants to make everything smaller and slower and more quiet,’ which was so very odd, he thought, because so did he.