Poppies and Sweet Peas: My English Nostalgia

I remember having a conversation with 2 young friends about nostalgia years ago. We wondered what we felt nostalgic about. 

All of us felt attached to our birthplaces to a certain extent, but interestingly it was somewhere else that we missed. 

I think, one would miss a place, or a period of time, in which he grows into himself or starts to understand himself, and this place or time is not necessarily associated with one's childhood. Honestly, for instance, I have always had an ambiguous feeling about myself during the years as a child and a teenager, and hardly can I say that it would be the time of my life to which I want to return. 

During the conversation, I told my friends that I really missed York where I did my final degree, spent 4 years living alone, tried to figure out how human relationship works, and met my husband. There, with the assistance of my family far away in Taiwan, I lived a life free from many obligations and responsibility. The memory is fully colored by the beauty of the country in many aspects; inevitably however, I have to admit, some bits of it are also heavily shaded. 

Corn poppy is one of the bright memories that I treasured about York. I remember seeing an ocean of them waving in the wind in an open field. It emblems the sacrifice of English veterans during WWII. Badges of poppy flowers are worn on days of commemoration. 

After a trip to London last March, I created a patch of corn poppies in my front yard to anchor my imagination. Since spring, they had grown amazingly fast and magnificent, and it did not take a couple of months' time for them to attain full bloom. 

Another plant I associated with York is sweet peas. My first encounter with this sweet-scented flowers was in my supervisor's backyard. It was on a midsummer's day, and all of us five to six supervisees sat in her garden discussing something serious in the rare and lovely English sunshine. The lovely summery afternoon was full of the sweet fragrance of the sweet peas in the garden, and ever since then I have fallen in love with this romantic aroma.

Before last winter, I sowed several sweet peas in the garden wondering what they would become. Except for some basic information from books, I did not know what they would look like and how they would smell in the end. They made very little progress in winter, but before I was aware, in the lovely printemps air they had climbed to the top of the supporting rack and started blooming. Their scent was rather scant and could barely be noticed unless within a very close proximity. However, the short-lived flowers looked like colorful butterflies clustering around in the garden.

I had wished that they would be able to adorn the garden for much a longer time, but unfortunately a typhoon, much earlier than it was expected, brought it down on a windy night.