Spring at Hellebore Acre

Spring has sprung;
The grass is riz.
I wonder where
The birdies is.
The bird is on the wing--
Ain't that absurd?
I always thought the wing
Was on the bird.

My mother used to recite this poem every spring.  Several times, usually.  I always thought it was silly, but as you can see, it stuck in my mind.  Now I recite it myself, more than once, every spring.  It's tradition.

Another family tradition--this one from my father--is to spend all winter poring over garden catalogues, deciding what to order.  I can still see him filling in the order forms from the catalogues in his neat, precise, almost calligraphic printing.  Soon the brown-paper-wrapped parcels would start arriving--I remember one year that he put in an order very early, and a parcel arrived just before Christmas.  Dad put it under the Christmas tree, as is, and opened it with delight on Christmas morning.

The catalogue orders, of course, were only for things he couldn't easily find in the local garden and hardware stores.  Long before it was warm enough to plant anything, he'd begin coming home not just with brightly colored seed packets but also brown paper bags containing bulbs, onion sets, and bulk seeds for things like corn and beans. And the day when he decided the time had come to rototill the garden was a highlight of every gardening year.

I do the same things--well, not the rototilling.  My garden is undertilled.  But I do while away the cold weather with my catalogues, and then at some point I give way to the garden craving and begin ordering things and visiting the garden stores.  Of course, Dad was a veteran, expert gardener who grew fruit and vegetables on such a large scale that he could almost have run a small truck farm.  Since I only acquired a house with a yard ten years ago, I'm still learning this whole garden thing, and mostly go in for flowers and shrubs.  I do grow a few herbs and vegetable--in pots, because most of my yard is shady, except for the croquet field, which is what we in the neighborhood like to call our septic fields when we want to be elegant.  Between that and the fact that we're infested with way too many deer, there's not much scope for edibles outside the deck.

I share Dad's love for daffodils.  For me, nothing says spring like seeing the daffodils blooming, preferably in large numbers and a wide variety of cultivars. I have planted hundreds of daffodils in my yard in the decade I've lived in my house, and every year I wish I'd planted more. Every fall I go a little crazy with the catalogues--Ooh!  I don't have any of these daffodils.  And here's a new cultivar. Half a dozen of each--what the heck, make it a dozen.  And then, in the late fall or early winter, I suddenly find myself muttering, "Where did they all come from? And where am I going to put them?" Not that I'm running out of space for daffodils, since they survive quite well in light shade and look wonderful dappling the wooded parts of the yard, but when the time has come to plant the bulbs, all the foliage from the existing daffodils has died out, so that the places where daffodils are already happily living look identical to the places that could use a spot of color.  Maybe this year, before the foliage goes completely, I'll get a bunch of rocks and stakes and mark the spots to be planted.

I made my first serious trip to the Merrifield Garden Center this week--I was only planning to look around and get some ideas, but somehow a few bulbs and plants came home with me.  And then when I was getting some produce at Whole Foods the organic rhubarb plants seem to have crawled into my cart all by themselves.  I've never tried growing rhubarb, so we'll see what happens. And then when I found out that DeBaggio's Herb Farm had opened for the season . . .

I have a lot of planting to do very soon.

Maybe today.  I was going to start yesterday, but by the time the family Easter dinner was over, it was cold and drizzly and too close to sunset.  So instead I did what I'm trying to make a recurring tradition.  I took my camera and went around my yard to record what was blooming there.  I plan to do this every month or so.  Although I think next time I will try to choose a warmer, dryer day.  Getting halfway decent shots of what was blooming there yesterday required wallowing on the ground beside them. I came in, mud-splattered  and festooned with wet leaves, and decided to stay in, since the light was a little dim for some of the shots I still wanted to take. I decided to finish up this morning.

Although I did have to go back out and retrace all my steps to find my iPhone, which had fallen out of my pocket at some time during the half hour I spent crawling all over my yard.  I found it, finally.  And remembered the time Dad lost his glasses because he was hacking away at weeds so vigorously that he dropped them without even noticing. 

Anyway, the photos turned out okay--all the ones decorating this blog were taken either yesterday or today.  The early daffodils are blooming, and the hellebores are thriving.  I have a lot of hellebores, since they're something the deer don't find appetizing--so many hellebores that I've nicknamed the place Hellebore Acre.  (Acre, not Acres.  I wish I had acres, but I don't.)

I also have hyacinths about to bloom and crocuses still hanging in there. Pieris.   Mountain laurel.  Daphne.  Puschkinia. Periwinkle. (For more shots, check out my Easter 2013 photo album.)

All too soon I will be complaining about the heat, or the late frosts, or the bugs, or the weeds or the rain or the drought or--most often--how the garden season is fast slipping away without my doing all the things I had planned to do.  But right now is my favorite time in the garden--early enough that everything seems possible.

Comments

[Toni Cox]

Do you order from Brent and Becky's? Their online catalog is just the best.
Last year I got some wonderful Coreopsis from Lazy S, south west of you.
I have taken note of where you are since my kids live in Purcellville.

[catriona mcpherson]

Beautiful! I don't have any daffodils here yet - just a few grape hyacinths out of all my favourite spring bulbs - but I'll get there. Got primroses, irises, columbine and speedwell on the go - I just need to get used to them flowering at the same time (and along with bougainvillea and yucca!)

[Elaine Viets]

I love a northern spring, and your garden looked especially fine. Enjoy.

[Dana Cameron]

I never knew there was another verse to that poem, Donna! Thanks!

[Anne Mikusinski]

My dad use to recite that poem(alas, only the first stanza) every Spring. He loved gardening, all flowers and the warm weather.
This year on the 27, it'll be 9 years he's gone, and I miss him awfully.
PS. Daffodils are some of my favorite flowers as well.