Daylily Nights: Barrel Run Crossing Winery and Vineyard

This June evening, in the old township of Rootstown, just where the Norfolk Southern tracks transect Industry Road without regard for the Western Reserve's careful right angles, a stand of daylilies open their tawny throats to the sun.

From a stand of tawny roadside daylilies, Angelica archangelica raises its yellow umbels.

The common roadside daylily, a gift from the Orient, escaped cultivation. Its presence along country roadsides, often in a lowlying ditch, is a clue that a place has been settled a very long time. Somewhere nearby somebody once brightened a kitchen garden or a dooryard with progenitors of these same orangey flowers.

Heritage Daylily Farm, Peninsula, Ohio.

The genus name of the tawny daylily, Hemerocallis, means 'beautiful for a day.' Just after the solstice, when days are their longest, its orange trumpets blare just for one day, reminding us to live each of these long summery days, to cast aside care. These rampant field flowers, perhaps the ones chosen so long ago to illustrate truth to those gathered on the Mount:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

In this rural corner of Portage County, Ohio, we are at that point in the Western Reserve where all the corners are square. Roads, townships, county lines: all platted on regular rectilinear quadrants. Mantua Center is right smack dab in the center of Mantua township. Palmyra centers its eponymous township. At the center of Nelson, the main roads converge in a diamond: a Methodist Church, a town hall, and Greek revival houses of the better sort let you know you are at the center of things.

An old maker, in the churchyard of St' Luke's Lutheran Church, in what is now Cuyahoga Falls, marks where the townships of Stow and Northampton once converged.

And so it goes: it's how the wilderness was tamed, it's how Connecticut sold off its rangy Western Reserve.  Intrepid surveyors, with chains and markers, through the swamps, ravines, and gorges, without regard to terrain, made their way west from the point where stone markers delineated Pennsylvania's western edge.

Back East, in the old state with its thin stony soil and long winters, you drew your lot, and based on your losses in the war, you received a plot, graded  1, 2, 3, or 4, based on a surveyor's snapshot perception of the quality of each  plot.

Due west, the fabled region, Connecticut's Western Reserve: an "earthly paradise," with rumors of fat loamy soil, and endless stands of black walnut, hickory, oak and chestnut. In winter dreams, a poor man in Connecticut becomes a landed gentleman on the Ohio frontier.

A stone marker, at the Norfolk Southern tracks, in Rootstown.

This June evening, we sit near those tracks, as trains rumble on the Norfolk Southern line, bound toward Ravenna, laden with coal. The perfect sound of summer in the Western Reserve: a distant train whistle, the clang of a rural roadside railway signal, the lowering of a red and white striped gate.

Barrel Run Crossing Winery and Vineyard, a new venture for an old family farm just outside of Rootstown, sits just off those tracks.

If the tawny trumpet of the daylily signals summer's peak, so, too, the startling rampant growth of a grapevine on a sunny slope. Its leaves unfurl to alarming proportions, its tendrils grasp out, attach themselves to whatever will pull its broad leaves closer to the sun.

As Galileo once said, "The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

The magic of this season, and each summer's abundant growth. On this night, on this terrace, with trellises laden with ripening bunches of Frontenac, Marquette, and Vidal Blanc sloping out toward the railroad tracks and the old rectilinear roadbed lined with orange lilies, you can almost hear the swelling of those sweet grapes, you can almost feel those broad leaves stretching, those tendrils grasping, ever closer to the evening's still warm sun.

There is nothing wrong with sophisticated undertones, or notes of tangerine or oak or licorice. But on this summer night I relish a sweet grapey white wine of Niagra and Frontenac Gris, grown right on these slopes, reminisccnt of wild grapes you might pluck from a low hanging vine.

Daylily nights: we turn our faces to the evening sun, just as the abundant broad leaves of the vineyard outstretch for yet more rays, the sun in no hurry to slip from the Western Reserve's horizon, at which point the daylily will shed its orange trumpets, that blared just for this one perfect day. Summer's very essence, in this sweet chalice of life.