Irene Hochheimer's Spring Flowers

My grandmother Irene Wormser Hochheimer was born 112 years ago on May 1.  She died in 1994, but every spring we have the joy of seeing the blooming plants she gave us from her garden.  The purple flowers above are a hardy primrose that she said a friend of hers collected from Siberia.

The winter aconite come up even before the primroses - we often see them as the snow is melting.  Irene gave us just a few of the aconite, and it has spread like crazy all around our garden and yard.

Irene (yes, even as little children we knew her by her first name) called the plant below a "white forsythia" -- its blooms come out on the stem like a forsythia, before the leaves, but it's not actually a true forsythia - it's a relative called Abeiliophyllum distichum, and the best things about it are how early in the year it blooms (a couple weeks before forsythia) and its sweet perfume smell.

The "bleeding heart" (dicentra spectabilis) spreads itself all around the yard - we never know where we'll see it from year to year.

On the other hand, the wood anemone (anemone nemerosa) happily comes back every year in its shaded patch at the edge of our woods.

We used to have a few epimedium but I only saw one blooming at the edge of the woods this spring. The yellow flowers are great, but the leaves are truly gorgeous.  I'm not sure which variety this is - there are a lot of them.  I think she may have told me, but I can't remember.

Irene had weird daffodils spread throughout her woods in Norwalk, and periodically (when there were lots of green leaves but not many flowers) she would dig them up in the fall, separate the bulbs, and re-plant them so that they could grow strong and flower again.  In the process, she would give some away.  Maybe because she grew them for so many years, they seemed to randomly hybridize themselves, and many of them are these strangely disorganized "double" flowers.

I would miss Irene even without the annual flowering reminders; her love, humor, and dedication to her family and her community inspired many of us.  But the flowers are a particularly nice way to be reminded !