Taking time for gratitude as her garden’s “second season” begins

Summertime 2012

The last of our June tulips have bloomed. Behind them, a few remaining oriental poppies – crimson, pink,orange, red and white, with petals as fragile as tissue paper – sway in the wind that rolls off the nearby north Idaho prairie. The end of the bright tulip display and the glory of the poppies marks the start of my garden’s second season. I am taking time now to notice and find joy in all the perennials that have come back for another summer, and in the flower and vegetable seedlings I started weeks ago, indoors.

I hope I never lose the sense of wonder I find in successfully growing flowers and vegetables from seed. When the first tiny leaves appear, I say “thank you.” Those tiny seeds, some no bigger than pepper flakes, survived and sprouted in small peat pots on my table-top greenhouses. When I moved them outdoors to the patio, they braved the caprice of sunshine, rain and wind that is springtime here. Watching a seedling turn into a real plant in miniature, with identifiable leaf shapes and a growing stem, makes me want to find a set of filmy Mother Nature wings and swoop around my garden.

There is a special place in my impetuous gardener’s heart for blue delphiniums. One recent afternoon, I transplanted many delphinium seedlings into our perennial flower beds. They looked so vulnerable in their new home, surrounded by fully grown plants. But when I checked on them a few days later, their leaves and stems had grown, and they looked positively delphinium-like.

I was also delighted by an unexpected bed of flowering verbascum growing near the hollyhocks and sweet peas in our backyard. I remember tossing a small handful of flower seeds onto the patch of rocky clay there last summer. The plants, with their lovely petals in soft yellow, white, apricot, and purple, growing on stems from a central rosette of leaves, look too delicate to have taken root in such seemingly barren ground.

The same nature’s miracle has happened in my new raised vegetable beds. Corn, sugar snap peas, pumpkins, zucchini, fennel, celery and basil, all started from seed, are still thriving. Our roses, both the heritage bushes and the new plants I have added, are in bud, and several are already blooming. They also are free of aphids again – not, of course, because of the banana peel “remedy” I wrote about recently but because of the pesticide-free spray I used on the beastly little critters this week.

So, except for needing weeding and watering, the gardens are doing fine without me right now. I would like to say I am content to stroll along the beds and then decide that my current set of plantings is manageable and that I will stop making new ones. But do you know a gardener who is ever ready to stop planting, stop adding just one more bed, or stop scattering just one more handful of seeds?

So, in this brief second season of my garden, I am grateful for all the beauty that is rising around me, all the kitchen-table bounty that is growing in the raised beds. As I pause, I also look at the bare patches where more beauty could begin, and more herbs and vegetables could grow. Hollyhocks near the front porch, Italian shell beans in a sunny bed, a “scatter garden” of sprinkled seeds near the tomatoes. More blue delphiniums anywhere. There is always a new season beginning in the garden.