The Full Pink Moon

The name of April’s full moon comes from a plant that many Midwesterners are familiar with, creeping phlox. The pink flowers of phlox are a call to gardeners across the region, a bugle blaring out “spring has come” and signaling time to till the soil and plant anything hearty enough to survive the fickle springtime weather and frost. A historical note on the origins of creeping phlox comes from the website for Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello:

“This ornamental phlox is native to the eastern and central United States and was introduced into cultivation by the late 1700s. John Bartram first cited this species when he wrote to Peter Collinson on December 1745 as it became one of the first "low-growing" species to enter Great Britain. In his The American Flower Garden Directory (1839) Philadelphia nurseryman and florist Robert Buist included the following description of this phlox: "In the spring of 1831, an eminent British collector (Thomas Drummond) exclaimed, on seeing a patch of P. subulata in one of the pine barrens of New Jersey, “The beauty of that alone is worth coming to America to see, it is so splendid.” Pink, white, and red garden varieties were known by 1850.”

One of the first flowers I began growing when I had a piece of property with a little ground was creeping phlox. I’d taken on caretaking my grandparents’ house and in the front yard was a little, raised garden with a birdbath at its center with a healthy crop of creeping phlox growing around its base. They flowered in April, little pinwheels of pink and white defying the cold. Since then I’ve been partial to the plant, even though its show of flowers ends early and leaves a scraggly blue-green mass of sprawling foliage.

Here’s a little more about the Full Pink Moon: