Spring in my step

With the flip of a switch, spring has arrived. We cut the winter garden to the ground two Saturdays before last, and not a moment too soon. Within days temperatures jumped to preternatural levels (shorts, if not swimsuit weather), and the early warmth and steady rains have accelerated and compressed the comings and goings of the spring flowers.

The list of things to be done is endless, of course, but what I like to do in the garden these days is just wander around and around. I can't see the same new bud or bloom too many times. It's as if I were holding the face of a prodigal, long-lost loved one, and saying, with great melodrama: It's you; It's really you. The thickening carpet of Scilla siberica, the blue of the squills shown off to its best not in sun but in deep shade, against a wall of deep green yew hedge; Helleborus foetidus, ready to bloom for the first time in my garden (hurray!), drooping with a dozen pendulous pasteled chartreuse berry-like buds; the Best Astilbe Ever, valuable 365 days a year, already a foot tall with fresh bronze elegant foliage, in the sump garden (a/k/a, alas, The Weed Farm); the actually compact euonymus 'Rudy Haag', hinting at autumn with thin racing stripes of burning-bush red up through its stems and its emerging leaf buds; and David Austin's Redouté, which rocks, waking up from its unprotected winter with new growth already two-thirds the way up its tallest stem.

I've resisted keeping Jeffersonian records of the day-to-day history of plants in my garden, seeing as it would put me over the guilt-trip baggage limit of things that I am continually failing to maintain to perfectionist excess. But...I'm going to try keeping note in the sidebar of the coming blooms, dividing the month into decanates ("E" for early, days 1-10, "M" for mid, days 11-20, and "L" for late, days 21-month's end). I may miss a date here or there, or confuse a cultivar or two, but it'll be okay...right?

Comments

[Kathy]

It will definitely be very okay. And belated Happy Anniversary. You sound like you're further ahead than we are, and I think we are further along than usual.

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