“Spring is icumen.” The change of the seasons is perceptible now — can you see it? More importantly, can you feel it? With the rebirth going on all around us, it’s natural to experience a sense of rejuvenation and hopefulness.
While the weather report isn’t exactly blissful, I’d rather the rain than snow and the climbing temperatures are encouraging. Early March has been living up to its reputation “in like a lion” but we can expect that to tame so that it lives up to the other part of the proverb “out like a lamb.”
Even the common adolescent takes note as my students brighten when the sun shines and then deflate when the temperatures dip. Agreed, everything is more tolerable with the sun. And subtle changes are happening: more birdsong, catkins on the hazelnut tree, and a softer feeling in the air that says spring is almost here.
These awakenings travel to our nerve centers and elicit responses. For the gardener, it’s time to begin another cycle of planting as nature reinvents itself again. Nature’s clock has been fast forwarded, urging us to make contact with the ground and nurture what is growing.
This first session in the garden may not appear romantic – a hunched figure in coveralls overseeing a brown canvas with a few green splotches doing mundane tasks. But for the gardener who has been inside for too long, it is a thrilling time of abandon. The mind cranks ahead, not seeing a drab patch of dirt with tattered remains of last year’s plants, but rather the garden that will be. You’re getting acquainted all over again with a place that holds some of your innermost dreams. You try to comprehend how this or that grew so large, recalling how tiny it was when you planted it several years ago. Even the obnoxious weeds like onion grass bring a momentary smile. It is nearly spring and you are in step.
And, as every year when you first venture out, there are memory lapses. It’s unlikely that every plant you put in the ground is memorized, so there will be markers or the plants themselves as reminders. The loop along the front border where I introduced new perennials last year I can only half recall. I will just have to wait to see what comes up where.
Then there is another kind of memory game or gap, known as “name that plant.” It is a plant whose name you know as well as the names of your children. But for a second or two it’s gone. You stare at the leaves and all you can think of is romaine lettuce. Let’s see, verbascum? No, too early. Foxglove? Still early. Then it rises up and trippingly comes off the tongue: primula! Oh yes, with unique green flowers! It’s like seeing someone familiar in an unexpected setting. A snag in the old mental rolodex. Spring is also for oiling the mind.
I always take pleasure in the simple things – rediscovering lost plants or uncovering their markers, finding plants that have survived… I wonder if the nigella will come back? …and the occasional item that has nothing to do with gardening (namely plastic dinosaurs and long-lost plastic Easter eggs). These revive memories of the summer long past and reinforce the idea that gardening is ongoing and not fixed.
Enjoy springing forward!
“There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.”
-William Wordsworth, “The First Mild Day of March”
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean