Spring Flowers Can Be Found in the Unlikeliest of Places
Discovering new things about my hometown
While I wasn’t born in Biscarrosse, I consider it my hometown. Growing up, I lived all around the world but Biscarrosse, a small beach town on the Atlantic Ocean, was my one constant. We spent all our summer holidays there, as well as a few Christmas holidays over the years. It’s the place I grew up, running in the sand dunes with my cousins.
Over the years, I have gotten to know this town quite well. The beach, the bike trails, the lake, the stores on the pedestrian road. The cinema we went to on rainy days. The night market. The restaurants. It’s home and it’s my favourite place in the world.
As an adult, I don’t have the luxury of spending my summer holidays on the coast. So I don’t get to go to Biscarrosse nearly as much as I used to. So, this spring, while I spent a few days visiting my parents, we decided to go spend the weekend at our house in Biscarrosse.
And I noticed something different.
There is a plant that grows all year in Biscarrosse. I don’t know what it’s called. We call it the fry plant because its thick protrusions look like French fries. It’s ubiquitous in Biscarrosse, growing in the sand and thriving in the salty air in ways in which very few other plants manage. It’s a thick, waxy, cactus-like plant. And this spring, for the first time ever, I noticed flowers.
On the pictures at the top of the article, you can see bright pink flowers among the “fries”. Some of them were light pink, or yellow, or white in other places.
I don’t know how I had never noticed the blossoms. Perhaps I had never visited during the season when they bloom. Perhaps, as a child, I didn’t pay attention. Or perhaps I had seen them before but that memory got lost in all my other memories of this place.
There is something magical about flowers growing on a beach. And there is something magical about noticing something new about a place you think you know by heart. Today, I wanted to share some of that magic with you.
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