The man's flower

“Why do you like marigolds?” I asked my neighbor Arnold who floods his lawn with flowers every spring.

“Because they’re tough,” he said.

That’s what I thought he would say. But I had to ask because I was conducting a scientific study. I was trying to prove that marigolds are a man’s flower.

He wasn’t finished. “They don’t need much care. They bloom from spring to frost. To keep them blooming all you have to do is pull the dead flowers off. I like bright colors, too.”

Then he said something I hadn’t thought of: “My mom always planted marigolds.”

Nostalgia creates powerful images. Many marigold planters grew up with the old-fashioned flower; it brightened their yards; grew everywhere, even in tire planters; and drank very little water. Weather doesn’t deter the marigold’s life. In the mountains, it’s not unusual to find them blooming at Thanksgiving.

“Why didn’t you plant marigolds this year?” I asked, looking at the pink flowers in the porch planters.

“I bought the flowers this year,” Sandy, his wife, said. “I don’t like yellow. I like impatiens.”

She’s proving my point: Marigolds are a man’s flower.

Every spring my husband buys tomato plants from Ginny, a neighbor with a green thumb and a backyard green house. When he returns with the tomato plants, he also brings back a dozen marigolds. Like Sandy, I don’t like yellow; nor do I like the flower’s strong odor. But I find a nice, sunny place to plant them, a place where the water hose doesn’t reach.

It’s not because I want them to die. It’s because I want them to live. These plants don’t need pandering. They want to be left in peace, except to have their heads scratched occasionally to remove the dead flowers. They respond to this deadheading by bearing even more orange, red, or yellow flowers.

With the minimal care that these plants need, you would think that women who buy wash and wear blouses and Nano-Care slacks would look for the same low-maintenance quality in their plants.

Needing more data, I looked for another participant. I found him sitting on his front porch in front of a bed of yellow, red, and orange marigolds.

“Why do you like marigolds?” I asked Wallace, who’s planted the flower near his front door as long as I can remember.

“They grow so well there in the sun,” he said.

They sure do, I thought, looking at the heavy yellow flowers smothering the impatiens peeping out from underneath them. Then he gave the quintessential answer, “They are easy to take care of. You don’t have to water them, weed them, or anything.” I didn’t ask, but I bet Wallace’s mother planted marigolds, too.

Marigolds have been around long enough to have a history. Even though you can buy dwarf ones or jumbo ones, African or French ones, they all come from the same wild ancestor that’s native to the Americas. Enamored with the hardy flower, conquerors from across the seas took some home. That’s how the marigold found its way into England in the 1500s. Writings from that time tell that the new owners quickly found other uses for them. They made tea out of the juice, petals and leaves. Mashed flowers became a dye for hair and clothes. Marigold juice stirred into a broth stopped heart palpitations, put into the eye cleared red eyes, and mixed with hog’s grease eased swelling or the pain of a bee sting. The odor wasn’t wasted either. Cold sufferers snuffed the juice up their nostrils to clear clogged nasal passages.

The plant was sturdy, dependable, a necessity in the medicine chest, but it seemed to have inspired little poetry -- unlike the willowy, graceful daffodil. The image of this golden flower, or rather a field of them dancing in the breeze, was all William Wordsworth needed to end his writer’s block and send him into creative ecstasy.

Serviceable marigolds don’t dance. Breezes don’t bend them for their stems are stiff, but this hardiness helps them survive the elements. It also makes them strong enough to survive dogs digging around their roots, looking for chipmunk tunnels under the flowerbeds.

And strong enough to survive pesky insects that kill many other plants. In the country, it’s common to see marigolds planted among the rows of beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and corn in vegetable gardens. People also claim that a garden surrounded by the bright flowers will keep deer from destroying the plants.

That brings me to my last test case, a man who surrounds his home with marigolds. My daughter calls him Popeye. “Why do you like marigolds?” she asked him.

“They remind me of fall,” he said, “and fall reminds me of deer hunting.”