Early
March 2012
If the
weather gurus are accurate, we’ll be blinking and peering at
long-lost sunshine this weekend. I, however, will not be fooled
again. Last week I wrote about planting primroses in our front porch
planter, and then enjoying their bright petals for a few days –
until they wilted in an overnight freeze. I received several kind and
instructive emails from readers after that column was published.
Their
common message was: If you feel compelled to plant primroses in
February or early March in north Idaho, do your planting in moveable
garden pots. Check the weather forecast every day. When the
prediction is a swoop down toward freezing or below, bring the pots
indoors or move them to a protected outdoor spot. Even better, keep
your hot-house primroses indoors in a pretty basket on the table
until the Garden Goddess actually acknowledges that it’s spring.
After I read those emails, I mentally tallied: Strike One. Strike
Two. Strike Three – and my primroses took a curveball to the
petals. Next spring I will be wiser.
I’m
also ready for any sunshine that tries to seduce me this weekend.
Instead of making another impetuous dash to a garden store for more
innocent primroses to torture, I’ll head outside with my long-nosed
shovel, digging up quack grass. The primroses were a wake-up. Instead
of trying to plant now, I’ll spend any sunny March days outside,
weeding and digging garden beds. (If the ground is still frozen, I
will accept this as a clue, go back inside and read another chapter
of “Vegetable Gardening for Dummies.”)
I hope
the weeding and bed-making will help turn more of my garden vision
into reality this year. In my mind, I see our front- yard gardens
blooming, first with jewel-toned tulips and daffodils, and then in
summer with perennials and roses. A lilac’s soft fragrance welcomes
guests at our door. Feathery red, purple and pale pink astillbe grow
in the shady bed below the kitchen window.
Last
year I planted the spring-flowering bulbs and made several small
perennial gardens in the front yard. My vision, though, sees lush,
sweeping gardens – and an apple tree that does not drop small,
acid-green, worm-riddled missiles onto my head. I will forgive that
tree this spring, though, because of its beautiful reddish blossoms.
In the side yard, I see a thriving vegetable garden, with tomatoes
and pumpkins, salad greens and artichokes, carrots and beans, an
asparagus bed, raspberry and blueberry bushes, and apple, pear and
cherry trees, first flowering and then bearing fruit.
The
reality in that yard is an aging birch tree, afflicted by blight; a
mighty oak that drops its leaves until February; a lovely maple, one
new pear tree, and lilacs and peonies that need transplanting. Also,
we have to build the raised beds, fill them with topsoil, and grow
the vegetables.
I want
to return our back yard to its former glory, dramatic with vintage
peonies and roses, and filled with the old-fashioned sweetness of
climbing honeysuckle, sweet peas and hollyhocks. In reality, the
yard’s focal point is a stately hawthorn tree, with rose-red
blossoms in summer and year-round café central for our backyard
birds. I will plant more sweet peas along the fence this spring and
cheer on last year’s hollyhocks, which survived the winter in fine
style.
We do
have old roses and lilacs still growing in the backyard. Their
existence is a testament to their rugged will to live, even when
visited daily by a galumphing sheepdog, who treats every bush or tree
in the backyard as his personal retiring room. But I see the
possibilities for my garden dreams and am ready to work hard
throughout the long season. What would we gardeners do without hope
and optimism?
I’m
just too gun-shy to plant more primroses.
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