Yesterday, I knew snow was coming. It was Friday afternoon, and the sun shone bright and warm on the flowers that have already started blooming. After work I grabbed my camera, and I went for a walk; I didn’t even need a jacket. As I type this, the world outside is cold and grey, and snow swirls down the street in gusts of wind.
We are in the middle of a fool’s spring, and I took full advantage of it this weekend. From after breakfast to before dinner yesterday, I had shears, rake, shovel, loppers, wheelbarrow, bungee cords, hose, and bags of dirt scattered all over the yard. I pruned roses, cut back ornamental grasses, raked leaves out of flower beds, moved lavenders, transplanted hydrangea, and kicked poor performers to the curb.
As I worked, I smelled fresh mint in the mint patch. I listened to birds chirp and leaves rustle in a warm breeze. When I pulled away dead debris and raked out dry leaves that have insulated the ground these last 5 months, I found green emerging underneath.
In February, first come the snowdrops, then the crocuses. Then, when all the other deciduous trees are still stripped bare, there’s one that blazes forth in bright sunshine yellow. With its saffron strands, the witch hazel announces itself against the bleak grey-brown of the winter landscape. It tells me, it’s not just the ground flowers that are coming. Here come the trees, and flowers in the sky.
A podcast episode showed up in my feed the other day: Why You Should Snap Pictures of Nature. I started listening while I unloaded the dishwasher in the early morning, and I finished it while I made my lunch. It’s on the Science of Happiness podcast, and in it, the guest talks about her-two week experience noticing nature:
I really like the idea of paying really close attention to what was very ordinary.
– Tejal Rao
She watched the progress of a leaf unfurling; she photographed it every day. “It looked like a, sort of like a leaf burrito.” She continually experienced awe.
Needless to say, I love everything about this: the focus on the ordinary, the awe, the photographing, the leaf burrito. So of course, I want to notice nature, too. Especially now that winter turns to spring, and every day something new is happening if I look closely enough.
After I ate my lunch that day, I went out and saw the crocus and snowdrops I blogged about.
Today, I saw my first bees of the season. In February. I had no idea they came out this early! I guess if there are flowers, there will be bees. As I poked around under the brown leaf litter in a flower bed, I saw new green sedum leaves coming through. I found a volunteer feverfew under the rosemary. And as dumped kitchen scraps in the compost, I saw a dot of purple out of the corner of my eye. The first vinca flower of the season.
The world is coming into color again, slowly slowly.
Today was warm and windy. The dry winter grasses whipped like ponytails out back. When I took the compost out on my lunch break, I carried my camera, too. I thought the snowdrops might have come up, and I was delighted to see that they have.
One crocus has opened as well, despite its greenery being nibbled to the ground.
My mind can finally rest about the garden. Friday was warm, and Saturday was above freezing. Both days I dug holes and moved plants. Then Sunday, as it snowed, I finally found a way to plot out my ideas for how to change everything.
The thing I love about gardening, aside from the fact that I get to be outside, and it connects me to the earth and all the little creatures — worms, birds, bees, bunnies — is that I can change it every year, like moving all the furniture around in a room to create a space that feels new and different.
At the end of every summer, I think, “Everything in the garden is good, I don’t need to change anything next year.” And then February comes, and I’ve been inside too long, and I decide everything, in fact, could be better. If I just transplant these daisies which are blocking the sun for half the bed, and pull out these Russian sages that are hidden by the Black Eyed Susans, and put some perennials in the new bed because really, that one was fine for its first year, but the annuals-from-seed took too long to come in, and then they were messy and too tall and reality didn’t match the tidy vision I’d laid out on graph paper.
My main objective this year was to break up a huge clump of Shasta daisies that look gorgeous during the 2 week period they’re in bloom, but the rest of the season are poorly placed — they get too tall and block a large swath of prime bed space. Their placement bothers me every year until they bloom, and then I can overlook it while they make me happy with their bright cheery blossoms, and then after the blooms fade, they irritate me again.
So Friday, when it was warm, I started breaking up the Shasta daisies, all 40 square feet of them. I completely rearranged the new bed I created last February on my latest grass-killing spree, and anchored the bed with a clump of transplanted daisies. I filled in the rest of the bed with flowers that will complement them in bloom time and in color, so that I don’t have to wait until July for something to happen like I did last year.
And, on Sunday, I finally figured out a way to plot out plants in a way that I can visualize how they’ll look in the space. I photographed the back beds, then annotated the photos using Preview on my mac. I had to combine two pictures to get a full panorama of the back hill, but I think I’ve finally (mostly) gotten to a point where next time it’s warm enough to work in the garden, I know which plants to move and where. The images aren’t perfect — the perspective is weird because of the hill and the angle, so the spacing isn’t super accurate — but they’re good enough for me to finally be able to rest my mind, now that the ideas are documented instead of me having to hold the vision in my brain.
Now I just need good weather and time. I’m dying to get everything moved and for stuff to start growing again.
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