Sorrel

This past summer, my mother began a new hobby. She took a sudden, almost manic interest in gardening. Nearly every day saw her bent over in our backyard, tending to plants; nearly every weekend found her in a nursery, perusing new options to pluck up and rehome into her growing collection. Each grocery excursion was an excuse to buy more for her new interest. She went out for milk, and came back with a new trowel, or a new set of neon green gardening gloves, or a new wide-brimmed sun hat. Magazines, vibrantly colored flowers embossed on their covers, materialized on every surface in our house, my mother browsing for ideas at the table at every meal.

I have very little interest in plants, gardening, and nature as a whole, as my mother very well knows. Nonetheless, on one particular occasion, I allowed myself to be persuaded to come with my mother on one of her outings to acquire new selections. She walked up and down the aisles, taking what seemed to me an extraordinary amount of time deciding on flowers. Did she want the pink or the red? The climbing rose or the rambler? The bulb or the pre-potted plant? I followed her—slowly—up and down the aisles, holding back my complaints as we doubled back again and again for second, third, fourth looks.

We came to a section that, even to my undiscerning eye, was unlike the rest. My mother, needlessly, pointed the flowers out to me. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be missed. These flowers grew tall. They bloomed open in provocative sprawls. Their colors were outrageous: as outlandishly orange as a creamsicle pop, blues as remarkable as the sky on the clearest Caribbean day, reds so rich that they brought images of garnets and rubies to mind. They were patterned with stripes, with dots, with crisscrosses. They were so unlike the tidy and neat garden plants we’d passed thus far.

These were the tropical plants, my mother told me, the ones that don’t grow here in our part of America without assistance. I knew we would leave with one. Sure enough, one of those tropical flowers caught my mother’s eye. It came in orange, white, yellow, and pink, but each one of them had the same center: where the petals met in the center was a dark red, so dark it verged on a plum-purple. The plummy shade expanded outwards in sharp spikes, becoming true red, then sunrise-pink, and finally faded into whatever final color nature decided upon. Its stigma protruded proudly from that same plum center.

“Hi-bis-cus,” my mother said, reading the label stuck in the dirt. She pronounced it oddly: hi as in hello, a strange emphasis on the bis, cus like because. Some strange blend of the American English and British English pronunciation, neither and at the same time, both.

I have a lot of experience with that blend of Englishes. I grew up learning it, living it. Well before I started kindergarten, I learned to read and write at home with my mother. Going to school confused that for me. I couldn’t understand why neither and either sounded different when my teachers said it; I was never sure whether grey (gray?) had an e or an a. Was it dreamed or dreamt? And so on, and so on, continuing even to this day.

My mother grew up in Jamaica, where she learned British English in school. At some point in her childhood, she followed her mother to America, where she spent the rest of her adolescence. She earned her high school diploma—and later, her various certifications and degrees—here in America. And even though she learned early on how to switch off her accent, it never did entirely go away.

“Hibiscus,” I corrected her. She looked at me strangely for that. Not because I corrected her. That happened regularly enough. The weird look was because I was familiar enough with the flower to know its name at all, so I explained, “It’s sorrel.”

Sorrel isn’t the national drink of Jamaica, but it might as well be. The taste is similar to cranberry juice, but earthier, tangier, more tart. Drunk often at celebrations like Christmas or Thanksgiving, it’s a drink heavily spiced with ginger, cinnamon, and sometimes, if the maker is feeling particularly festive, liberal amounts of rum (the actual national drink of Jamaica). Regardless of whether it’s served hot or iced (and with or without rum), drinking it warms you up from the inside, the heat of it spreading from your belly, through your veins, up and out all the way to each finger and toe in the same jagged spikes as the colors of the flower it’s made from. The color too, matches the flower. A full pitcher of it is so purple, so condensed and deep, that it looks like ink until light shines on it. A glass of it is red, almost like blood but lacking blood’s viscosity. The dregs of it left behind after everyone goes home is runny pink where it’s mixed with the water of melted ice.

As far as my mother knew, and her mother, and her mother, sorrel the drink is made from sorrel the plant. Not to be confused with sorrel the herb, sorrel, the plant used to make sorrel the drink, is sold bunched and dried in bulging pouches. Flower petals, to be sure, but withered away like that, they’re hard to match with the plant that grows wild on the sides of Jamaican roads. And evidently, to my mother at least, neither was reminiscent of the hibiscus for sale in the Lowe’s nursery in South Carolina, individually potted and carefully tended to.

She wanted to know how I knew that hibiscus and sorrel were the same, but truthfully, I didn’t know what to tell her. Just as I don’t know when I realized that I need to spell realize with a "z" and not an "s," there’s no specific memory of me learning this. Maybe I once recognized the unmistakable color of the hibiscus tea at a trendy coffee shop. Maybe I once looked it up to explain to my American classmates when they saw it at my family’s summer barbeques.

It took some convincing for my mother to believe that this pretty flower labeled hibiscus was the same as sorrel, but she was even more eager to get it after she was finally persuaded by the Google articles and images I pulled up for her. At this point, we had only moved to South Carolina the year before, and it was much more difficult to find sorrel here. So far, we’d only found it once—in a Spanish food-market a two-hour drive away, sold in pitiful quantities for outrageous prices in little bags labelled Flor de Jamaica. The Thanksgiving the year before was the first in my memory that there was no sorrel served to wash down the turkey. But now, she could dry her own sorrel to make the drink whenever she wanted.

So we took it home. My mother planted it that same day. It stuck out amidst the rest of her humble flower garden. Literally stuck out—it was taller than any of the rose or hydrangea bushes nearby, its petals doubly as large as theirs. The orange hibiscus she had decided upon was the brightest splash of color in our entire backyard.

The hibiscus flower, a tropical plant transplanted elsewhere. Flourishing, yes, but in a home where it must struggle to survive. Bold coloring, with little choice but to be defiant in its difference.

Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away, now. My mother has been collecting discarded petals straight through the summer and into the fall. There’s not much, not from just our one plant, but there will be enough for one pitcher of sorrel, enough for a glass or two for each of us. This year, along with our American turkey and American ham, we’ll have a glass of sorrel on the table ready to help us wash our meals down.