Floralia
The festival of Floralia is a very old holiday. It honors Flora, the Roman idea of fertility that is embodied in spring flowers. Flora is one of the oldest deities in the Roman pantheon. She is older than Rome, being closely related to and likely derived from the Sabine Flora whose festival, Flusalis, was an entire month in early summer.
Floralia was celebrated on 27 April in the Republican era but was moved to the 28th under the Julian calendar. It was a day of feasting, but it opened a week of games, the Ludi Floralia. You can begin Floralia on Sunday or Monday, this year, but in keeping with this holiday’s association with the plebeian class, the Roman working class, I say begin the festival when you’re not at work.
Like the Cerealia, which immediately precedes Floralia, the plebeian aediles were responsible for organizing religious rites that crossed over into entertainment (or the other way around). There were performances, games and public banqueting. The patrician writers who gave us the records of the time were prone to sniffing at the earthy nature of the celebrations. Juvenal tells us that prostitutes engaged in mock gladiatorial combat in the nude, lambasting the whole of Roman culture in hilarious theatre. Hares and goats, animals of noted fecundity — and not a little chaos, at least in the case of goats — were set loose in the streets, according to Ovid. The crowds were pelted with beans and vetch and lupines, all symbols of fertile fields.
There is some crossover between Cerealia and Floralia. The official Florifertum, the offering made to Flora in her temples, was a sheaf of wheat that had been paraded through the streets by the office of the flamen Florialis. Flora is the unbridled maiden — a deity that scared the tunics off patrician Rome. Ceres is the care-giving matron, who was only marginally more tolerable. Arguably, these goddesses — Ceres, Flora, Venus, Juno, Persephone — all share the same root in the sacred feminine, an ancient deity that represented not merely potentiality, but total control of reproduction and food production. The first owners of wealth and well-being. The gods who were deposed to inaugurate male rule…
In other words, women…
The Greenleaf Moon goes dark today at 3:31pm. I feel like Vermont is increasingly missing out on this lunation each year. Seems we are going straight from deep snow to full bloom in a matter of a couple weeks. This year is the worst yet, though at least with the accelerated melt there isn’t as much mud. The trees are finally starting to leaf out now, but only just. They snoozed through the whole Greening Moon…
Other missing signs of spring… Friday was Cuckoo Day in the UK, a day to go hunt the grock… that is, go try to hear the cuckoo’s, or grock’s, call. This is not actually a day but more of a season. For many weeks from the equinox on, people will fan out into the countryside hoping to be the first to hear the distinctive call of the cuckoo, who is named after his voice. This tradition is quite a lovely excuse for spring hiking and picnics. Or it was…
For a broad range of reasons — from drought in Africa where they overwinter to light pollution that confuses navigation for these nocturnally migrating bids to precipitous drops in insect populations — cuckoos have declined by over 30% in the UK since 1995. The cuckoo is now listed as a Bird of Conservation Concern in the UK. The main problem is that the traditional timing of migration, one that would have birds arrive around the end of April, is proving fatal in our new climate.
There are two main migration paths: one that follows the outline of the western African coast and crosses the Sahara at an oblique angle, and one that heads more or less straight north. On average, those birds that follow the more eastern path over the Sahara Desert leave about eight days earlier than those who are still tracking west. Those that are still heading west and around are traveling a longer route in warmer weather. The later departure and the longer route mean that birds are trying to cross the desert and the Mediterranean when spring has given way to summer’s heat. Many don’t make it. And then with insect declines, birds weakened from their trip often die of hunger when they arrive up north.
These days, if you hear a cuckoo, it will probably be those that are starting to follow the earlier eastern migration route. And it will probably be long before April. The early birds are arriving in March. So, if you’re just going out now to hunt the grock, you are probably too late.
Though it is still probably a good day for picnics…
cuckoo time
cuckoo sings out spring
changeling in contented nest
songs of troth betrayed
Central Vermont is on the northern edge of the breeding territory for western hemisphere cuckoos. We don’t get to hear them often. However, American species are far more elusive, and they do not sing the usual cuckoo song. The black-billed cuckoo sounds more like a muted digital alarm clock than a cuckoo clock. So it’s unlikely you’re going to hear it even in the South where the cuckoos are more common.
However, we have other harbinger songs up north. And right now, the main one, the spring peeper wood frog, is in full voice. So… it may still be brown, we may have missed the Greenleaf Moon, it may not feel like spring at all, but Spring is here. And tomorrow is the new Flower Moon.
Maybe we’ll get some flowers… before we head into flood season.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 