The Spiritual Gardener: Magnificent Spring at Last

For some reason spring just seems more “musical” than the other three seasons.  Do you know the sound of this vernal music?  The color symphony of spring, I mean: shy, tentative white of snowdrops, then a small rush of yellow, white and purple (crocuses), then a louder color tone of pink, blue white and purple (hyacinths), then the loud major theme of yellow (forsythias and daffodils), then a milder white echo of that theme (star magnolia and pale cherries), then the pink crescendo wave of plums and weeping cherries. Then comes the assertive magenta of the magnolia soulangeana, verging on purple, then those shocking purple azaleas that are so much earlier than all the others.

And all this is only the overture for the first main and very diverse color theme of spring, the tulips which are about to begin fluting everywhere, and then of course all hell breaks loose with irises, peonies and roses, and we completely forget for a while the colorless landscape we have lived and brooded in for so long.  It is like Tchaikovsky, re-scored madly by Mahler.

To honor this symphony of color, I have planted three new “Eden” roses, a neglected classic rose that is possibly my favorite rose and the one I would grow if told I could only grow a single rose.  The buds are a fairly strong pink, almost carmine, then they open to a pale pink and then fade to a mellow cream color.  I was trying to train two to grow over our back door at our former home in Colorado.

I can only afford tiny specimens of classic roses like this, but I will take good care of them and they will not, I know, be small for long.  I also got four gorgeous and not very expensive hydrangeas from a big-box hardware store, so I can replace the four unhappy forsythias in the shady hedgerow, where of course they are most unhappy (duh), and move them to the sunnier spots as they deserve.  For now, the blooming hydrangeas are brightening up the house, and we still have some late-blooming amaryllis looking beautiful indoors.

Meanwhile, both of the roses I collected wild from the Chesapeake are flourishing, which is well because it looks as though we lost a nursery-bought rose in the garden over the winter, a rather weak one in the crescent bed.  Our (little) magnolia in the arch bed has precisely one flower on it that is nearly open and by our garage we have two huge palms that my wife wanted to buy at a local garden center, destined eventually for our summer patio but now looking rather miffed and sulky on a cold April morning.

Finally, I managed to get out in the garden.  I finished rooting out the ivy by the fence and, despite popular prejudice, apparently you can teach an old gardener new tricks.  Digging there is a dangerous job because this site must have been used for a long time as the rubbish tip for one or both our property and the neighbors’, to whose land our land once belonged, and I find a lot of broken glass in the soil.

I have to be extremely careful here, having cut myself several times weeding this area.  Now I wear gloves when weeding this bed, proving that even an older gardener can go on learning, if he cuts himself enough times and sheds enough blood to pay for his obstinacy.  I moved seven rose mallows, with their snow white hibiscus flowers and crimson throats, from the porch bed to the middle of the crescent bed, to provide height and structure there.  I then staked up the honeysuckle tripods, providing a stout vertical element for them to smother, which they will of course enjoy doing, the wicked things.

On the way home Friday, I stopped at a garden center and got their last pink magnolia, to go in the hedgerow near the dark, black-green yew, which should make a striking backdrop. Too, I bought a big pile of bricks at 52 cents each. It is insane how much fun a guy can have with an inexpensive pile of bricks like this.  When we moved to town we noticed a neighbor’s driveway was lined with handsome bricks and it made their house look like it belonged on embassy row.