By Jill Williams
”The promise of May is the joy of renewal, a time when nature paints with its brightest colours.” John Burroughs Spring has finally come to the valley arriving about three weeks later than last year. The grouse are drumming at all hours and the phoebes have returned to the porch. The phoebes have nested in the side porch for as long as I have lived here. They usually reuse last year’s nest and last year’s nest is still thereon the top of the north pillar. For some reason known only to them, this year the phoebes have made themselves a new nest on the south pillar. This year’s version has lots of mosses and cedar bark and mud to hold it all together. And it mysteriously has higher sides than last year’s version. I know nothing of the mysteries of phoebe architecture….
The early crocuses and snowdrops are finished and have given way to the daffodils. They lasted a long time in this year’s very cold and damp spring. As much as I love the crocuses and snowdrops, the daffodils are my favourites of all the garden flowers.
This year the daffodils started to come out just as ice storm clean up got under way. A large poplar was uprooted and fell right across them. The daffodils are no stranger to nature induced chaos.
When I first started to plant daffodils on the hillside there were lots of small poplars there. I had a vision of daffodils amongst the trees going up the hillside. And, of course, I should known that when I made a plan nature couldn’t wait to come and mess it up. I had about a year of daffodils and young poplars. The poplars were eventually found by the beavers and ended up in the big dam down at the creek. I have to laugh now when I remember the trail they made across the lawn by dragging all those trees across it.
The moral of the story is that when you make a plan nature will laugh at you. I ended up with something very different from what I had originally pictured. I have left a few small dogwoods and a wild apple to grow up and they look just fine. I have learned over the years not to get too attached to what I might think a particular landscape should look like.
The spring ephemerals, bloodroot and hepatica, came up amongst all the fallen branches and trees. It was especially wonderful to see them this year with all the chaos of the ice storm.
I recently saw double hepaticas in an English gardening magazine. Obviously the plant breeders have been busy to have created them. But I don’t think they are much of an improvement on the singles that are very common in the woods around here. It seems a bit of unnecessary meddling to me. The same goes for double bloodroots that I saw in a Canadian catalogue years ago. They are also not much of an improvement on nature’s original single bloodroot. Why do we insist on always gilding the lily?
At the edge of the vegetable garden I was sad to see one of my oldest single hollyhocks didn’t make it through the winter. Hollyhocks are usually short lived perennials and I have a group of them that have defied the odds and lived more than a decade. They always get rust, of course, but they manage to bloom before the worst of the rust takes over. Spring being the season of renewal I’m sure it won’t be difficult to find something to replace the hollyhock.
Like everyone else I will be cleaning up after the ice storm for a long time. But I can’t think about chaos all the time. Or look at it for that matter. I’m enjoying the daffodils and after them will come the species tulips and then the hybrid tulips.
The heat of the summer will be here soon enough so let’s enjoy this cooler, colourful time.