North passages

I steal flowers.

I think the Latin for this is furis flora, which sounds much more respectable than “flower thief.” Then again, I earned two years of “D” in high school Latin (and the teacher was generous), so don’t trust me on this.

My criminality, while opportunistic, is nonetheless premeditated: I keep clippers in my car.

I’m not trying to put the Burton flower stand out of business or anything. And I don’t sneak into my neighbors’ gardens at night to clip prized dahlias … generally. I just seem to notice things growing alongside the road that need my attention.

Things I like.

Things that are, well, free.

Right now, for example, there are drifts of frothy ivory Queen Anne’s Lace and empty lots thick with lemon yellow, button-top tansy. There are clusters of wild daisies, their heads tilted upward like sunbathers. The beach where I live is trimmed with a sort of primitive sunflower I haven’t yet found a name for. There are rambles of wild pea (a vetch) in both pink and white, and here and there thickets of the long, drooping magenta blossoms of butterfly bush. You could hardly ask for a better bouquet.

I brought up the subject of this mid-summer bounty at the Burton coffee stand the other day, and it almost instantly morphed into a heated debate about the ethics of picking flowers, or fruits for that matter, that hang over fences into the roadway. There are those who believe anything in the public domain is, well, public. There are others who, it is said, man their fence lines with shotguns, guarding against perambulating posie pickers.

A debate about this issue was not my intention, but people with enough caffeine in their blood streams will argue about almost anything until the effect wears off — and the customers at the Burton coffee stand are not shy about expressing their opinions. Sometimes it reminds me of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in London. The only thing missing is a soap box to stand on.

But to return to our subject, you may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks roses have been blooming all over the Island — vast masses of thickly clustered roses in pink and red and white and sometimes all three in one blossom. Unruly tangles, really, from my point of view; they can sprawl 20 or 30 feet across and climb high into trees. And that’s the thing — from my point of view.

By cutting them I’m doing the flowers a favor: I’m not stealing, I’m pruning.

The plants will be better off as a result of my tender ministrations. Next year, they will bloom more fully and in a more orderly manner than if they had been left to their own devices. Really, it is a mercy I care for them. And that, thanks to my mostly German heritage, I care about orderliness. The fact that I also fill vases with these fragrant blossoms at home on a regular basis is simply a by-product of my careful and magnanimous husbandry — I mean no one is paying me for all this labor, after all…

And lest you think me a mere itinerant gleaner — a “clip-off artist” as it were — I’ll have you know I went to the library to study up on these rambling roses. I assumed — ignorant urbanite that I have always been — that they were wild. But no. These are old shrub roses, as it turns out. And that raises an obvious question: Who planted them?

These roses are too elegant to be self-seeders. This is not fireweed, after all, nor foxglove, freely colonizing cleared land. These are venerable old roses. These are aristocrats, not arrivistes. But where are the rose lovers who planted them? What’s happened to the homes around which they had once flourished? I can’t help but see, in my mind’s eye, someone with a spade lovingly creating a deep, richly composted home for the original rootstock by their front gate. How else to explain the fact that they seem to have outlasted those who planted them?

These roses are like markers of what once was on an Island that once was more thickly settled — an Island that, in early photos, is stripped of trees and gridded out in settlers’ plots. You cannot view these photos at the historical museum without marveling at how much of the history of this island is no longer visible. Or at the speed with which Mother Nature reclaims her empire. It is stunning — and humbling.

The roses, then, are perhaps the living record of those who staked their futures here, and now are gone.

And we are the arrivistes.

— Will North is the author of more than a dozen books. His latest is

“The Long Walk Home,” a novel.