Amy in the Garden

I’ve heard of specimen plants. Dictionary.com describes them as, “a plant grown by itself for ornamental effect, rather than being massed with others in a bed or border.” I know of a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree, planted in one yard, that is the essence of specimen: worthy of its own stage, and worthy of all attention from the garden’s visitors. I long to plant a specimen hamamelis mollis, or Witch Hazel, on my hillside, to best appreciate its first-in-spring chartreuse blooms, and its beautiful shape.

Yesterday I saw my first specimen duck: a beautiful male common merganser. There was nothing about him at all that was common. He flew across the bridge over the Croton Dam, alone, and commanding all attention. I was the only one there to be commanded, and he took my breath away. An elegant bird, with a long white body, blue-gray markings and a remarkable dark green head.

When I recovered, I looked to the right, and saw the water spilling over the dam, light where it raced over the concrete lip, and then immediately dark as the reservoir bottom dropped away. Far back from that edge, a curving rim of ice led your eye back over the rest of the reservoir, still locked in frozen embrace. And that rim carried the rest of the common mergansers, visiting, resting, swimming. A bed, or border, of birds, if you will, that were separate in every way from the specimen. Male and female, they bustled about, and they were lovely. But they could not compare with that male rocketing through the air just above me, just in front of me. He was there and gone in a flash of wings, and I thought about him for the rest of the day.

WORDS FROM OTHERS

“The long, narrow bill with serrated edges readily distinguishes mergansers from all other ducks. Common mergansers are among the largest ducks, but are less stocky than eiders and goldeneyes. In flight, they appear more elongated than other ducks, flying in trailing lines close to the water’s surface.”

–www.ducks.org, the website of Ducks Unlimited