Human Flower Project

In Two Springs at Once

Where is transplendancy more likely to occur, the late-April garden in Louisville or the New Orleans Jazzfest?

Peony ‘Tiny’ blooming in Louisville, KY

Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

I’ve lived in England and the mountains of North Carolina, but they can’t top Kentucky in April and May. There may be a more beautiful spring spot in the world, but you’ll need to prove it. White blooms of the native service berry in the bare deciduous forest of early April were proof that our long, gray Ohio Valley winter was coming to an end. Virginia blue bells soon covered the lowlands along rivers and creeks; red buds and dogwoods were fast on the heels, coloring-up the woodlands just before they turned dark green.

So I don’t like to leave home in spring. But there are always exceptions. And there is the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. New Orleans has an inescapable soul, thick as invisible clouds of Kentucky spring pollen.  And if a soft shell crab po-boy sandwich doesn’t do it for you, then I promise you, the music will. Dance and be moved.

The author presents a soft shell crab po’boy, Jazzfest cuisine

Photo: Rose Cooper

With my wife, Rose, on a fall visit for a Bar Mitzvah eleven years ago, I asked a denizen of New Orleans nightlife if she could recommend any good music. She probed deliberately, with a slow, syrupy accent, “Whadda ya wanna hear?” (Try stretching-out hear to two syllables.) I wasn’t quite sure. Like a patient, in a doctor’s office, with peculiar aches and pains, I’d have to give her a clue before she could come to my aid.  The list of cures was long—r&b, jazz, reggae, rock & roll, and zydeco.  Dozens of options only confused matters. Rose and I pieced together an evening on our own, at a dingy club with small poolroom dimensions just a few blocks from our Uptown hotel.  The two-hour show was a moment that registers for evermore. James Brown and the Famous Flames did it for me in 1967, and Stevie Wonder, opening-up for the Rolling Stones in 1971 did it, too.  Both are embedded in my foggy memory bank.  All three moments were out of body experiences, the third one blessedly uninfluenced by drugs or alcohol (time heals…). The 3-piece New Orleans band with bass, drums and keyboards rocked that juke joint until 2:00 in the morning.

We ran into the local acquaintance the next morning, and she asked what sort of trouble we had gotten ourselves into the night before. I said we’d heard this great group (I couldn’t remember the name). She quizzed me a bit before I told her a black, blind pianist led the group. She looked at me puzzled and said, “Honey, that don’t help me one bit. There are a thousand black, blind piano players in this town.”

It had been Henry Butler, by the way. Dr John calls Butler “The pride of New Orleans, a visionistical down home cat and hellified piano plunker to boot. “ Where had I been? …Lost, but now was found…. (The newly released documentary film The Music’s Gonna Get You Through profiles Butler and visually impaired students during his Creative Music and Jazz Camp. There are also anguishing scenes of Butler returning home following Hurricane Katrina.)

Scree garden with dogwood in bloom, Top Hill Rd., Louisville, Kentucky

Photo: Allen Bush



I’ve had such moments in the garden, too—fleeting and just as unexpected as running across Henry Butler. There’s no sense chasing them. I never know when they’re going to come, but they will. I have only to be in the right place.  Some evening, just as I’m packing-up my trowel, the light will be just right. I look around wondering what exactly it is… I feel good, just like I knew that I would. James Brown sang it and I get it…So good, so good, I got you…

There have been no such moments in the garden this year – not yet, anyway. Nothing “transplendent,” either.  (For that, Shelly Duvall, playing a Rolling Stone reporter in the movie Annie Hall, required the mystic presence of the Maharishi or “Kafkaesque” sex with Alvy Singer played by Woody Allen.) If there is to be spring moment this year, it needn’t be epic or “transplendent. “ I’ll be happy with what I can find.

Dicentra spectablis ‘Gold Heart’, Phlox stolonifera, and Trillium recurvatum in the author’s garden, Spring 2010

Photo: Allen Bush



This has been an odd spring. I can’t recall ever dragging sprinklers out in April before. And the garden bloom sequence has gotten badly jumbled. Chilly March temperatures backed-up blooms on hellebores and daffodils. Then it got way too hot for days at a time in April, one day even hotter than any recorded high temperature of all July last year. Peonies got pushed into bloom a few weeks early. So were some of my columbines and the purple flowering Japanese roof iris. Sweet scented viburnums couldn’t wait any longer, either.

There were only four or five rainout days in March and April.  Lots of work got done. Garden clean up was easier than usual since the warm, dry autumn had stretched into early December. It was a good time to divide a few precious hellebores and an evergreen Euphorbia x martinii  (both seem slow to recover, so don’t follow my lead). The snakeroot divided into a half-dozen pieces as easily as an astilbe.  The snakeroot Actaea (Cimicifuga) racemosa and a sycamore Platanus x ‘Sutternii’ have been planted in memory of our fallen sassafras—or at least near where the tree had stood for many years.  We had to take out the large, dying sassafras or risk having it take down the house if it fell.

Dwight Franklin and Jacqueline Mayfield in a tribute to Mahalia Jackson at the Jazzfest’s Gospel Tent, April 24, 2010

Photo: Allen Bush

It’s easy to be overcome at Jazz Fest with so many choices. There are eleven simultaneous stages going at once from eleven in the morning until seven in the evening.  You can’t see everything.  HFP’s Julie Ardery, a veteran of Jazz Fest’s past, wondered where I might go at the mid-afternoon Friday time slot. The line-up offered Dr. John, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic and Irma Thomas’ Tribute to Mahalia Jackson featuring Jacqueline Mayfield, all on different stages. Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers’ Tribute to Rockin’ Dopsie Sr. jumped out at me, too.

A break in the weather: The Dumaine Street Gang and Divine Ladies Social & Pleasure Clubs parade with Da Souljas Brass Band at Jazzfest, April 25

Photo: Allen Bush

It was pouring rain so taking cover in the Gospel Tent was an easy choice. The Mahalia Jackson Tribute delivered the goods. Jacqueline Mayfield assured the audience, “He’ll come, if you ask him. It’s only a prayer away.”

Saturday’s weather looked worse with a threatening forecast: possible hailstorm or tornado. 

Cloudy skies and an afternoon breeze were answered prayers. It didn’t rain.  The afternoon parade of the The Dumaine Street Gang and Divine Ladies Social & Pleasure Clubs with Da Souljas Brass Band went off without a hitch. Skies were clear on Sunday.

The Preservation Hall Band, invited singer Amy LaVere on stage, and she had asked the audience, “You living the life you love?”

I wondered about my garden. Had I forsaken spring in Kentucky? LaVere started singing,  “Ah, baby, won’t you please come on home! Daddy needs Mama! Baby, won’t you please come home!”

Back in Louisville after the New Orleans Jazzfest, Allen Bush and Rose Cooper find

their Japanese roof iris (Iris tectorum) still in flower.

Photo: Human Flower Project

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