Sure an' we all have green thumbs today

March 17, 2013

Top o’this St. Patrick’s Day mornin’ to all you green thumbs, from an impetuous gardener who has a bit of blarney in her soul and in her pen.

I recently vowed not to do any more planting, especially of primroses, no matter how sunny the weather. Instead,planned to be outside, digging up quack grass from a bed I’d weeded too gently last spring. I kept half of that promise.

Last week I was shopping for birthday presents for our little grandsons and walked past an indoor sales display of primroses. I stopped (of course) and admired those cheerful little plants – and then gave my shopping cart an energetic push and kept moving toward the toy department. On the way back to the checkout stand, I happened to pass the primrose display. (Okay, I took a three-aisle detour to see them again.) But I take seriously any promise I make to readers. I did not buy the primroses, even though there were a few rare, double-ruffled ones in an old-fashioned magenta shade that I remember from my grandmother’s garden. (Not, of course, that it was difficult to walk away from them.)

I broke the other half of the promise – digging quack grass – because of a beastly cold and fever. An afternoon of heavy weeding would have left me unfit to teach Sunday School to a class of fabulous teenagers o, afterward, to direct a rehearsal for a musical I wrote for them. Weeds can wait; children and teenagers come first.

The combination of gloomy cold symptoms and a week of grey skies left me feeling that I needed to find a bit of springtime soon. I didn’t have to search far. In a flower bed at the edge of our patio, the tips of tulip bulbs peeked up. In a brick planter on the planter, green shoots of two clematis vines promised another summer of exotic beauty. I also found signs of spring-flowering bulbs rising from their winter mulch blankets in our front-yard gardens, and hollyhocks, jaunty with their Irish-green leaves, ready for their more fragile spring cousins to join them later in the season.

Although we’re still getting some snowfalls here in northern Idaho, spring seems to be fighting back harder against the lingering winter. The snow melts quickly now, instead of piling up in drifts or calling for an early-morning shoveling. Finches perch daily on our feeders, and robins have breakfast on our lawn. Our Lenten roses (hellebores) are nearly ready to flower on the front-porch planter. And I’m nearly ready to start organizing the 84,000 seed packets I seem to have bought during the winter. This, I know, is the first step toward spring for me. I will wait, as patiently as an impetuous gardener is capable of waiting.

Last week I received a lovely email from a reader, who asked for gardening advice. (Only professional restraint keeps me from adding a bouquet of exclamation points to the end of that sentence. Very few people ask me for gardening advice, especially if they read my newspaper column or my blog regularly.)

Part of the reader’s email seems especially apt for St Patrick’s Day. He noted that his family has a shamrock plant that has been blooming nonstop since September 2008, and he wondered if this was an odd occurrence. I did some research and replied that indoor shamrock plants do tend to bloom well, compared to outdoor shamrocks, which can be more erratic in their flowering. My own view is that my reader not only has a green thumb, but a thumb as green as the emerald hills of Ireland.

Because we all have a bit of Irish joy and warmth in us today, this Italian Irishwoman wishes you an Irish blessing:

May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire.

And may your thumb stay green throughout the gardening season.

My favorite furball's voting No on remodeling project

March 12, 2016

Our remodeling project has started, and crews are scheduled here for at least the next month. Most members of our household have adjusted fairly quickly to the occasional clamor of pounding, sawing, and sanding drifting upstairs, as a bathroom gets gutted and refitted. My husband, Lee, is finishing the painting on our main bathroom, and I've finished packing most of the kitchen, which will get a small face-lift after the bathroom is done. Last month I filled our freezer with homemade dinners, knowing that our kitchen soon will be off-limits. The stove (which won't be operable), refrigerator and microwave will move temporarily into the dining room, and I'll set up a camp kitchen for Lee and me in there.

I don't actually know what a camp kitchen looks like. In all my many decades, I've gone camping and slept in a tent only once, when I was a teenager. During that unforgettable weekend, a spider visited my sleeping bag and bit me on the face. I learned then that spider bites can make your face swell, redden and hurt. On our last day at the lake, my friend tried to tow her parents' motor boat out of the water and ended up drowning her family's station wagon. All five of us teenage girls were in the station wagon as it started to sink. I helped pull my terrified friend, who could not swim, out the backseat window and towed her to shore.

Good times – so good and so deeply memorable that I have never gone camping again. But I'm fine with making do in our dining room, heating thawed, homemade dinners, making fresh salads (the fridge will be plugged in,) and doing dishes in the bathtub. I am a hardy woman of Idaho now, after all. As long as I can microwave water for hot tea, I will smile and carry on.

One family member, however, already is feeling the stress, and has let us know that this remodeling project has severely disrupted his life and his political future. As soon as Benjamin BadKitten, our black and brown Maine coon cat, heard the first whine of a power saw, he squashed himself under an armchair in the living room. He emerged hours later, long after the crew had left for the day, looking wild-eyed and flat-eared.

I picked him up and let him settle onto my lap, from where he informed me that his campaign for president of the United States has reached a critical point. To me, that point needs to sharpen and poke my BadKitten gently in the butt, so he will decide to shed his latest delusion, along with his excess winter fur. Benjamin has already received seven promises of write-in votes, to try to head off Him Who Must not Be Named from taking his party's nomination. If that cat gains more supporters, we're going to have to file financial disclosure documents and print up some yard signs.

The next day, I closed off the kitchen from the rest of the house while a crew member measured the counter tops. After I cut off the kitchen access, I saw Benjamin flattening himself under a table in the living room . (He said he was doing his yoga stretches.) A few minutes later, I heard very loud cheeping noises and hurried back into the living room to find out the source of the sound. My BadKitten was crouched in front of a narrow space between a wall and a bookshelf. His fat tail was flicking fast.

 

A small chickadee, cornered and still chirping, struggled to squeeze behind the bookshelf. I scooped up Benjamin and shut him into my study, then carefully set the little bird into my hand and carried it outdoors. I have no idea how Benjamin brought a live bird into the house when his only open entrance – the cat door in the kitchen – was blocked off. And my cat wasn't offering any explanations. The most I could get out of him was a sly, feline smile. With smoke-and-mirrors skills like that, he might fit into the political scene all too well.

Unless my favorite furball can persuade me to start canvassing the neighborhood for him, I plan to spend some time in my garden this coming week, planting early spring vegetable and flower seeds and clearing the remaining fallen leaves from the flower beds. I've been checking the gardens daily, looking for new plant growth and whispering thanks to the Garden Goddess for protecting the tender perennials through the winter. Crocus, the garden's own Easter eggs, already are blooming purple, white and yellow. Tulip and daffodil bulbs are showing more of their green leaves every day, happy in the chilly sunshine. The oriental poppies promise another flamboyant fashion show in a few months, when they will flower in shades of red, purple, pink, watermelon, white and orange. This week, I'll also do some scatter-planting of flower seeds, especially the “bread seed” poppy seeds I saved from last summer's blooms. In this in-between season, I'm feeling ready for spring.

My backyard shrubs will bloom –--- but what about the sickly grass?

March 5, 2016

On a recent cold, raw day, I looked out onto our backyard and imagined how it will look this spring and summer. The weigela, hibiscus, honeysuckle, lilacs, forsythia and wild roses will be blooming in pale pink, deep red, lavender blue, fragrant white, sunny yellow, and old-fashioned magenta. The great, leafy branches of the hawthorn tree will shelter singing, chirping birds. Tall sunflowers will turn their faces to the sky, and hollyhocks and sweet peas will add color along the fences. On the patio, tomato plants in big green pots will flower and bear fruit (I desperately hope.) And our backyard lawn will stumble into its summer hangover: brown grass, nearly dead and studded with weeds and nettles.

Faithful readers know I tend to be an optimist about all things garden-esque, but the state of our lawn tempts me to remember all the bad words I do not say. Nearly six years of hard use by two big dogs (now only one) has left the grass patchy, shredded, dying, yellowed, and overrun by weeds that seem to share the same death-defying genes as cockroaches and BadKittens. Our lawn is an annual eyesore. My husband mows it regularly, but we don't irrigate it during the dry months, because it just feels wrong to waste water. We haven't spent time or money on fertilizing, reseeding or weed-killing because our elderly Old English sheepdog, Rags, would lumber outside and pee all over the newly seeded soil. Simply barbecuing the cash, instead of investing it on lawn care, would be quicker and more cost-effective. (We could toast marshmallow over the flames as the dollar bills turned to smoke.)

It's been too cold and rainy lately to do any late-winter gardening, so I've had even more time than usual to think about garden projects. The backyard disaster of our lawn has risen to the top of my thoughts and left my brain thundering. What if we (meaning my husband) built raised beds in the backyard, added gravel paths, and did away with most of the lawn? I broached this idea to Lee last weekend and then sat back as his builder's mind considered and engaged. It didn't take long. Curved paths, he said, with the path-side of each raised bed also curved to follow the lines. I loved it already. But can you fill the new beds? Lee asked me.

Several springtimes ago, he built eight fabulous wooden, raised beds in our side yard, including a big, tiered central planter for flowers. I have grown vegetables in the rectangular beds every summer, always with mixed results, crop-wise, but with joy and hope every time. Of course, I'll be able to fill the new beds, too. I can plant a kitchen garden of lettuces, peas, beans, zucchini, broccoli, carrots – maybe even corn, if the weevils can't find the new corn patch.

So what would you plant in the beds we already have in the side yard? Lee asked. I just looked at him for a moment. I would plant more flowers, I said finally, and barely stifled myself from adding: Duh. More roses. An old-fashioned cottage garden. A cutting garden. Lee raised his hand in a stop sign. Got it, he said. I beamed at him, hesitated, and then went for it. Do you think you could start on the new raised beds this spring? He answered, with great patience, Absolutely. Just as soon as I finish painting the walls of our bathroom, the walls and ceiling of the downstairs bath, sanding and painting the cupboards, drawers and woodwork in our bathroom, painting the kitchen cupboards' doors, and hanging the flower art you want in the kitchen. (He also has a full-time job as managing editor of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.)I thanked him, hugged him, and went out to buy more flower and vegetable seeds.

BadKitten for President update: After the results of Super Tuesday earlier this week, my fluffy, black and brown Maine coon cat Is ready for the pleading to begin. Any day he expects to hear party bigwigs beg him to accept a draft as the only candidate who can stop Him Who Must Not Be Named. The BadKitten is already racking up some promises of write-in votes from readers of my Impetuous Gardener blog. While he awaits the call to serve his country, Benjamin is considering a few changes to the Oval Office. Job One will be a new litter box, embossed with the presidential seal.

My life's quilt is filled with many colorful squares – and I can't even sew

February 27,2016

A handmade quilt with multiple squares, colorful fabrics and creative designs: This is the way I see my life. Maybe you have a similar image for yours Often, we probably wish we could beam all our energy onto only one, solid-color quilt. Instead, we have to manage our time, to take care of all the fabric squares that make up our lives. My quilt includes squares for husband and family, writing, volunteer work with children and teenagers, reading, attention-demanding cats, cooking and, of course, impetuous gardening.

I'm using a sewing metaphor here because it's the image I saw in my mind, not because I am a seamstress. Anything beyond sewing on a button or hemming a skirt is too much pressure. In my junior high home economics class, my sewing teacher made a ceremony of presenting me with my own personal seam ripper. “You're going to need this tool – often – if you decide to take up a needle anywhere outside this classroom,” she said. She was sort of smiling, but not too sincerely.

This week I've been resisting the urge to spend all my time in the garden, clearing away the last of the wet leaves, celebrating the emerging shoots of the perennial plants for a new season, clipping the dead stalks I didn't get to last fall, and just finding joy in the brisk air and late winter sunshine. But I have more quilt squares to attend to, the most complex of which is preparing for an upcoming home improvement project in our kitchen and bathrooms.

Most of the work will be done by professionals, but my husband, Lee, with help from our son-in-law and our son, is doing all the painting and most of the demolition work. This involves a sledge hammer, pry bar, and aching muscles. My job is to box up everything in our kitchen and bathrooms. I've packed and labeled fourteen boxes from the kitchen and have at least that many to go – not including the essential dinnerware, utensils, canned and dry goods we'll need during the temporary exile into the dining room.

So I settled on a plan for the week: Spent all afternoon last Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the garden; on Monday did a big honkin' load of cooking and freezing homemade meals for our dinners while the kitchen is off limits; on Tuesday wrote my column, made a special dinner, and welcomed our son's visit from Seattle; spent time with my toddler granddaughter Wednesday morning, then packed more kitchen boxes before leading two youth groups at church that night; did laundry and more packing Thursday and Friday, and then finished the week with the reward of another day in the garden.

Cups of tea and chapters of books are always the colorful stitches that connect the squares of my quilt. Every afternoon I eat a light lunch and spend half an hour, finishing my tea and reading at least one chapter of my current “living room book.” Do other readers also have books they read in company and books they read before bedtime? I've kept the pattern of two books going simultaneously for decades, and can switch easily between the plots and writing styles. Without the comforting routine of tea and fiction, and my week's action plan, my life's quilt would quickly have started to fray and fade.

BadKitten for President update: A recent blog post noted my Maine coon cat's decision to bow to public acclaim and become a national presidential candidate. But since then, I've sensed Benjamin's reluctance to get off his ample hind end and plunge into the frenzied world of donors, speeches, meet-and-greets, debates and interviews. He suffered a setback early on, when his best shot at a high-dollar donation fizzled. My husband did not think a contribution to the “A Bird in Every Tummy! Vote BadKitten” super PAC would be a prudent financial investment. So, without the prospect of big bucks, my favorite long-tailed, non-politician is considering suspending his (nonexistent) campaign to spend more time with his family. On hearing that, Lee is considering opening his wallet. A traveling BadKitten means an absent BadKitten.

'Spotlight' wins the Oscar: Stand up. An era is passing

The newspaper drama Spotlight won the Oscar for best picture last night. It portrayed the reporting team at the Boston Globe, which investigated the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. I 'm a former Catholic and have been a newspaper junkie all my life. Without my daily paper and cup of tea, it's not morning at my house. My first real job was as a reporter at my hometown paper. I married a newsman, the finest I have ever known, and count current and former journalists among my cherished friends. So I'm stepping way out of the garden today for a very personal blog post about the profession I still revere, even as I know it's dying. I had to write this.

When I was a high school senior in 1967, I was awarded a journalism scholarship from my hometown newspaper, the Aberdeen Daily World. A job offer came with it – part-time every day after my classes at Grays Harbor College, where I studied for two years, before another scholarship sent me to Italy. Every time I climbed the stairs to the World's newsroom and breathed in the newsprint, the printer's ink and hot type, and the lingering tobacco smoke of decades of reporters and editors, I imagined I was Lois Lane.

My father – brilliant, quicksilver and fatally flawed – was a newsman for the county's leading radio station, before scandal sent him away. When I was a little girl, I remember sitting at our kitchen table, eating buttered soda crackers and waiting for his five o'clock radio newscast. He had promised to use a new word for me and would ask me later if I had heard and remembered it. His word that night was a fancy way to say “rain:” precipitation. He didn't come to see me for eleven years – from when I was eight to 19. His only communication was a few letters he typed on newsprint half-sheets, on a vintage Royal typewriter – the same brand of machine I would use at the Daily World. During those absent years, my father worked as managing editor at two small newspapers, jobs that sent his blood racing and kept his demons mostly leashed. When I, at age 19, wrote to tell him I'd been hired as a reporter for the Daily World, he reestablished a connection with his daughter, the writer.

At the Daily World, I found mentors and friends, people older than I, who taught by example the importance of accuracy, integrity, attention to facts and to detail. Some were hard-drinking and had lived hard in other ways. Some were profane and darkly funny, who used their wit to hide the sadness of the beats they covered. Some had given their souls to their jobs; some dealt, alone, with personal heartbreak after deadline. I was a girl among grownups, but they taught me well. Sometimes they let me set free the words inside my heart on a feature story. I adored nearly all of them. Years later, the retiring managing editor cited me as one of the two most brilliant writers of his long career. I thought my heart would fly away, floating on stunned joy.

I met my future husband, Lee Rozen, at the Daily World. He – from a nearby town even smaller than Aberdeen – was a journalism student at the University of Washington, home for the summer and working in the newsroom as a wire editor. Our first date was covering the Sky River Rock Festival, Lee as the photographer, and I as the feature writer. We married in 1971, I, an English major with a B.A. degree, and he, a J-major with a new reporting job at the Vancouver Columbian. I was soon hired there, too, to cover a lengthy fee-sharing trial, whose defendants were former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and former Washington State Attorney John J. O'Connell, two charmers whose personalities dominated the trial. They were acquitted of all charges (a bit different from pure innocence,) and I got a front-row seat to a master's class in legal maneuvers, big-city newspapermen (both of the San Francisco papers sent reporters,) and deadline writing.

At The Columbian, I reported on and wrote a multi-part feature series on the gay community in the Vancouver-Portland area. I couldn't use my sources' real names, because, in the '70s, their jobs might have been in danger if readers had recognized them and condemned them for being who they were and whom they loved. I've never forgotten them and the way they helped shape the adult I finally, slowly became. When The Columbian's editorial board endorsed Richard Nixon for President, I organized and collected money to pay for a quarter-page ad, headed :These Columbian Employees Support George McGovern for President. We signed our names, though we knew we 'd put our job security in danger. Senator McGovern carried one state, Massachusetts, in the national election. I wrote to him and enclosed a copy of the ad. One of my most cherished mementos is a personal, signed letter of thanks from the gentle, smart and good man who abhorred the war in Vietnam.

At The Columbian I learned lasting, hard-won lessons, about joy, shadows, and heartbreak, while working as a reporter and editor, and a college instructor of English and journalism. In 1983, my diagnosis of Stage IV cancer sent Lee and me, with a young son and infant daughter, to Seattle, where I slowly grew well again. Lee was hired and earned promotions to editing and management jobs at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and became founder and manager of its website.

In 2010, Lee was named managing editor of The Moscow-Pullman Daily News in north Idaho and is loving the chance to mentor his young staff of reporters and to work with local owners of vision, guts and integrity. I stayed away from newspapers for decades, but never from writing: Seven nationally published books, with translations in more than 20 languages. Now, in this beautiful university town, I write a weekly Saturday column, The Impetuous Gardener, for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, have a blog of the same title, and write plays for children and teenagers of the Presbyterian church where I volunteer.

On Oscar night, I bounced with joy when Spotlight won for best picture. But Lee was more solemn, more reflective. He has dedicated his adult life and given countless hours of personal time to journalism, and has suffered serious health problems while doing his job. And he knows newspapers are dying. They are cutting staff, losing advertisers. My beloved Aberdeen Daily World has eliminated several publication days each week, as have many other papers. The profession I still think of as a calling, filled with newsmen and -women like my husband – people of integrity, intelligence, caring and cojones – has become “the media.” It's a phrase often used with disdain, venom, and simplistic blame. Woodward and Bernstein doesn't ring too many bells anymore, nor do the huge, honkin' number of detailed, carefully researched news stories that let readers know what's happening in their towns, at city hall, on campuses and classrooms, in legislative meeting rooms, and in families' living rooms.

When Spotlight had its golden moment last night, I rewrote in my mind the powerful line in To Kill a Mockingbird: Stand up. An era is passing.

Getting down in the garden dirt, while politics brew inside

Last week I spent my first afternoon of the year on my knees in the Church of Dirt and Flowers. I felt a powerful joy as I gently removed the blanket of soggy leaves that had protected our flower beds since October. Under the leaf covering, I found emerging tulip and daffodil bulbs and the first green shoots of the perennials I'd planted last year, when I expanded a front-yard bed. I worried whether they would survive last summer's extreme heat and drought and then the shock of hard freezes and snowfalls. The gaillardias' seemingly dead stalks poked up like brown bones among the new bulbs. I thought I'd lost those dark red and gold, daisy-like plants. All of the oriental poppies were showing lacy fronds, but the pale rose-colored potentillas looked dead. When I carefully clipped away the hollow sticks, I saw the lovely surprise of tiny, green leaves, already forming at the base of the gaillardias and potentillas.

 

There is so much hope and wonder in early-season gardening. Every year I feel it, when I reverse my autumn tradition of taking down the garden and, instead, clear away the winter's legacy of rotting leaves and windblown twigs. I use only my hands, protected by thermal gloves, to do the leaf-clearing, because the new growth beneath them is fragile. It seems an annual miracle that these still-young plants can survive the Garden Goddess's whims. The tiny shoots I see in February remind me of the power and beauty of nature's cycles. If ever I lose my thankfulness, if I forget to fall to my knees in the dirt, I know I will lose the true reason I am a gardener., impetuous and imperfect as I am.

 

I worked alone that day as I cleared away the wet mat of leaves. Tessa the Vague, my calico cat, who had been last summer's chief garden staffer, is too frail now to be outdoors in the cold. While I was in the flower bed, Tessa was curled inside on her rug, near the heat register in the living room. The most likely candidate to replace Tess – actually, the only remaining possibility – was perched regally on a stack of boxes in the dining room. Abigail Grump, our long-haired, black and white cat, is solitary by nature and born to the aristocracy. Abby has an expressive vocabulary of meows, which she uses to command me: “Pet me on my head. Feed me. Pet me again. Open the door for me. Even better, why don't you just stand at the door and wait a few hours until I'm ready to come back inside?” When the weather warms to a temperature she finds acceptable, Abby likes to spend her afternoons in peace, under a tall perennial plant in our front garden. She is bossy, imperious, and an accomplished nag. She might deign to accept the role of chief garden staffer, but only if I clearly understand who does the actual gardening, and who does the supervising, ordering-about, and criticizing.

Benjamin BadKitten, my former chief garden staffer in nearly permanent exile these past nine months, is far too busy with his possible new career to consider returning to duty. An editorial page column this week from my Daily News colleague, Jean M. Chapman, sent Benjamin's ego soaring past Pluto. Ms. Chapman, a devoted animal lover, who has two rescued dogs, ended her column with the following thoughts: “We'd get a cat if we could get a 'BadKitten.'One wonders who will end up as the candidate for the Republican Party. There are fewer and fewer good choices. The Democrats aren't much better off. Too bad our dogs and a certain BadKitten can't run. They would up the quality of the pool real fast.”

Imagine the political earthquake at our house when my fluffy, black and brown Maine coon cat heard the news that his name is being mentioned publicly as a presidential candidate. He, of the already magnificent (and delusional) sense of self-importance, immediately began making plans. (He dismissed the possibility of Ms. Chapman's two sweet dogs as serious threats to his nomination and inevitable election, because he has never met a dog he can't dominate. Just ask his best buddy, our 70-pound Old English sheepdog, Rags.) You'll need a political platform, I told him, and talking points for speeches, campaign rallies and debates. “I don't need another platform,” he responded (in his vivid imagination,)lifting his little black nose in the air. “I already have my cat tower for naps, although I'll probably need a fancier one now. And you can just write stuff for me before I make my appearances before the cheering, adoring masses. Just don't write anything about me pooping.” He narrowed his green eyes and looked at me sternly.

Is there anything else I can do for you, President-to-be BadKitten? I asked. He thought for a moment. “Before I start campaigning, I'll need a style update. Buy me a gallon of hairspray: super-mega-hold strength. Then you can help me shellac my tail “ – a long, fat plume of a tail, it is – “over my back and onto my head. The American people are so done with the comb-over. But the tail-over, BadKitten style, will be a huge success. Huuuge. ”

No planting, just garden-dreaming this weekend

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.