Although March seemed endless this year, April is here at last. There is nothing good to be said about March, other than it is over. Daylight Savings Time arrived early this year giving us more light at the end of the day, thus more time to consider the state of the garden. By mid-March some gardeners reported a noticeable change in their gardens, but I suspect the change was in the heart of the gardener and not the garden. After a mild day or two we convince ourselves it is the beginning of the gardening year.
The gardener’s year does not synchronize with the calendar year. January, February and much of March is spent hibernating and dreaming. April 1 is the real start, and March merely the wind-up. With all its climatic vagaries, March does manage to offer one definitive idea: Winter is over. In my former Staten Island woodland garden I knew I would soon hear the spring peepers in the bog. The saying goes that after they have been heard three evenings, spring is here to stay. In my Rhinebeck garden the beds are cleared of mulch and debris. A major tree pruning has removed the dead branches of the Black walnuts and opened up the canopy of the Norway maples in the hope of bringing more light into a dark border.
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| Snowdrops in a Woodland Garden |
The first sign of life in Rhinebeck is the appearance of snowdrops. They are beloved of gardeners who have nothing to do in March and garden writers who have nothing to write about. Snowdrops face downward, so to appreciate them you have to drop to your knees and peer under the blossom. It is the only way to distinguish one variety from another, but only the most devoted gardeners do this.
The best way to enjoy them – and most other early bulbs and spring ephemerals – is to plant hundreds at a time. Few of us have that much space or strength, so a clump or two close to the house will have to do. Even better, a clump or two close to the street will lift the spirits of passersby.
If you have a table outdoors pot up a handful of snowdrops and let them spend the winter there. Start watering the pots at the same time you see them start in the garden. This not a bad practice with other tiny bulbs and spring ephemerals. You can place them around a terrace, outside a door, on the front steps – any place where you can watch them grow.
In Rhinebeck the daffodils are just beginning to show, while in the city they are already covering the hillsides of Riverside Park, a six-mile strip of land between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. The land rises and falls with paths through the hills now covered in daffodils and the beginnings of flowering cherries and magnolias. The slopes of the park are tiered, and daffodils are best seen on hillsides like these where they can be left alone after blooming, needing no cutting back for maintenance. Every spring I visit Muriel Peters’ daffodil garden on Staten Island, if only through old photographs and notes. Muriel was – and I hope still is – the epitome of the single-focus gardener; daffodils are her passion and her specialty and each passing year sees the addition on new varieties.
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| Muriel Peters Daffodil Garden |
If you are still indoors and desperate to get out of the basement where you have supposedly been cleaning tools, plan an early sowing of lawn grass seed. This presupposes that your soil is prepared and ready for planting. Seed scattered on old lawns will germinate in the first warm weather and thicken the lawn before the appearance of crab grass in the summer. A freak spring snow is particularly effective for sowing lawn seed. As the snow melts the seed settles into the moist earth and waits for the first mild days of spring to sprout.
Pay attention to your house plants; they will need more watering than they have all winter. The days are lengthening and the plants readying for a growth spurt. Last summer I invested heavily in pot plants: plumbago, mandevilla, alocacia, calocacia, a giant palm. We brought them indoors (“we” is a euphemism; it was really Dan alone) to sunny windows where they spent a warm and quiet winter. In early May we will bring them back outdoors, trim them back if needed, and wait impatiently for them be grateful.
Last year, for the first time, I ordered a number of plants online from specialty nurseries. I’ve not yet seen a sign on life on those purchases, a group of plants I had only read about: darmera peltata, persicaria, patrinia, wasabi. I am trying to be patient; only time will tell.
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| A Harbinger of Spring |
