Cannas From Heaven
Carelessness appeals to me, in people and plants. Uncombed hair, raggedy leaves, the confidence to slouch. So, naturally, I love cannas. I first saw them in the late ‘50s, an era of lazy gardening and affection for loud colors--fiery red, diesel orange, the scorching yellows of the tropics. We had just moved to a housing tract hacked out of a walnut grove in San Jose. In the relentless sunlight--no landscaping anywhere beyond the scrap of lawn and single walnut tree that had been spared in each yard--cannas thrived. If people bothered to plant anything at all, they put in fuchsias, pyracanthas, tea roses--and cannas. Against our naked wood fences, their petals fluttered like chopped flags, with none of a rose’s prim insistence on good form. They bloomed as soon as they reached knee height, their spear-shaped leaves rising to 6 feet or more. To me, half that size, they were giant beanstalks. And then I grew up and never saw them, except occasionally in the raw dirt around trailer parks or in front of a falling-down house.
Lately, though, I’ve been seeing cannas everywhere. Newer, quieter ones with dark bronzy leaves and blooms like whipped cream, and low, variegated types you can wind like ribbon through your flower border. Like a lot of other so-called redneck plants and granny greens--daylilies, for example--cannas have, with help from growers and importers, worked their way back to respectability by diversifying, toning down, getting smaller, less common, less indelicate. At the same time, the public is getting misty-eyed with nostalgia, wondering where all the color went and where to find those big lilies we used to play in when we were 6.
Though my family called them lilies, cannas actually grow from rhizomes--bulky underground stems--rather than bulbs. Their name, according to a dusty book I came across (“Florida’s Fabulous Flowers: Their Stories”), means “help from Buddha,” but a lot of cannas in cultivation come from Central and South America. As early as 1600 they were introduced to Europe, and by Victorian times they were wildly popular bedding flowers in the United States. Since then, more cannas have been tracked down in the world’s tropics and subtropics. They’ve been imported and hybridized to make them shorter, bushier, darker, lighter, bluer; to make their flowers bigger, their petals flecked, their leaves striped--you name it. Rosalind Sarver, who owns a canna nursery near San Diego, sells a white one called ‘Ermine.’ Los Angeles plant hunter and nurseryman Gary Hammer found a new red-streaked yellow stunner in South Africa, ‘Transvaal Beauty,’ and it has just been put on the market. They’re different from the cannas I fell in love with, yet appealing just the same: tough sun plants that don’t mind a bit of shade, especially in the San Fernando Valley. Give them rich soil with good drainage, plenty of room and enough to drink. Divide the plants after a couple of years, and they’re happy. When they’re through blooming in the fall, just cut them back. By late spring, there they’ll be, as dignified and purposeful as corn, stems swaying, leaves rattling, flowers mussed, Buddha’s helpers, the definition of careless grace.
