By Mildred Blaisdell
Buffalo, NY – It’s nearly the end of March. My flower garden had snow cover long after everyone else's snow had melted. And yet that doesn’t stop me from getting ready for the garden season.
The official kick off to the garden season is the annual garden night my friend and I always have in February. When we can’t stand the idea of wearing boots for one more day, when we can’t bear the idea of moving another shovelful of snow another inch, when we can’t face bundling up in hats and scarves and gloves one more time, we know it’s time for garden night.
There are no rules for garden night, but there are some supplies that we need. Rubber cement is an important component of the evening’s activities. It helps to have scissors, rulers, and highlighters. We need the piles of garden catalogs we’ve been saving for weeks and lots of old gardening magazines. With our garden journals in front of us we start clipping, and pasting and planning. By the end of the evening we have lists of things to buy, ideas for new beds, pictures of plants we can’t live without, and new hope that spring will be here soon.
I’m not a faithful journal keeper. Anything that needs daily attention, wears away at the lining of my nerves. But short, intense journal keeping is energizing. That’s why I love my garden journals. I have a pile of them. Before every season, I pull them out and read them. Sometimes they’re entertaining, sometimes they’re instructive, and sometimes they just reflect the shallowness of my interest in gardening. The best ones record my garden life from the February garden night until August, when I usually get tired of the garden, and let it get away from me. The worst ones, last year’s for instance, stop at the beginning of May. There was so much work to do in the garden, that I was too tired to record what I did after I did it.
But in the late winter, I get the urge to start it up again. For Christmas, my husband bought me a daily calendar with a garden theme. On February 7th, the thought for the day was that this is the first day in our part of the northern hemisphere when we have more that 10 hours of daylight. The calendar urged me to look at the plants in the house and notice that they were starting to put out new growth. Within two days, I noticed new growth on the grape ivy and the jade plants. Maybe this late winter garden planning is my form of new growth. I’ve forgotten the disasters of last year’s garden and only remember the good things---waves of daisies, mounds of rhubarb, hanging baskets of red tuberous begonias, drifts of white impatiens and a stunning show by the wegelia bush.
In March the garden is all possibility. There hasn’t been too much or too little rain. The deer haven’t developed a taste for my latest addition to the flower beds. I’m not exhausted from digging, weedng, and hauling mulch. The weeds haven’t yet staged a coup, and I’m still in charge.
I’ve added a Japanese hoe to my arsenal of garden tools, placed an order for plants from Botanical Garden, and made a list of new plants I can’t live without. It’s only March but I’m ready.
Mildred Blaisdell teaches English at Williamsville East High School.