All around me I hear the steady drone of leaf blowers as landscaping crews remove last fall’s leaves. Occasionally they are interrupted by the honks of geese flying north. It must be spring. In my garden the same spring processes are taking place, albeit more slowly and quietly. I like it that way. As the last of the snow has receded, I have begun the annual clean-up, rediscovering my home landscape. As I go through the beds and borders, I hear the plants’ voices as they rouse themselves after the long winter.
Early crocuses and snowdrops are the loudest, yelling like aggravated teenagers. “Get this stuff off me,” they complain, struggling to emerge and bloom through clods of soggy leftover leaves. I try to attend to their needs first, followed by those of the daffodils, which are pushing up aggressively through the soil. The hyacinths are joining the chorus and even the bleeding hearts are sounding out as they emerge.
While I listen to the cries and whispers of the early spring-flowering plants, I prune the rose bushes. Traditional wisdom in many places holds that you should start pruning roses on St. Patrick’s Day. Some years this is problematic because on the day when everyone turns Irish, it is still snowing. Other years it is problematic because spring started in February and the roses have long since broken dormancy. This year the timing was perfect. I pruned back several bushes, noting winter’s toll on the canes. This year the roses have more dead wood than normal, probably in response to the large amount of snow and the thorough icing-over the shrubs received on at least two separate occasions.
One of my favorite roses, the hybrid musk, ‘Felicia,’ has lost a lot of wood and it is not clear yet whether it will recover. The bush is one of my oldest and has given faithful service, producing scores of intensely fragrant pink blooms in flushes throughout the growing season. Last year it was also home to a small bird’s nest. If ‘Felicia’ is a goner, I will replace it with another bush of the same variety. First, of course, I will have to dig out the deceased ‘Felicia’ and replace all the soil in and around the planting area with fresh topsoil. Roses are susceptible to replant disease, which dooms new roses planted in the same spot where an earlier rose has died. I will wait and see whether ‘Felicia’ pushes out some new canes. I am betting that it will.
It is ironic that with all the new life springing forth from the earth, clean-up time also calls for life and death decisions. In addition to ‘Felicia,’ a couple of other roses are looking iffy. One is a grafted specimen that appears to have dead top growth and a very healthy root sucker. The sucker will produce roses, but not the variety that I chose. It seems sinful to contemplate the removal of a healthy rose—and the soil around it—but the root sucker variety is undistinguished and the wrong color. It will probably go.
The old yew by my front porch sings its own song, but I have never really warmed to it. It is the sole survivor of three that originally served as foundation plantings in front of the house. The other two are long gone, and the survivor took hard hits over the winter. It is now lopsided and sad-looking. A lilac or some other less weighty shrub would look much better in the space and serve as a more effective focal point for ornamental plantings. Yews have extremely hard wood and deep roots. I can’t get it out myself, but this year I may call someone to remove the whole thing.
One of my two oakleaf hydrangeas lost about half of the big, healthy branches that would have borne lots of flowers late in the spring. To get it back into shape, I am going to have to do some hard pruning and, by doing so, sacrifice many of this year’s flowers. The sentimentalist in me whispers that if I wait until after the bush has flowered, I’ll end up in the same place without sacrificing all of this year’s beauty. I’ll think about that as I nip back all the mophead hydrangeas, which still bear the dead remnants of last season’s floral glory.
Early spring is a time when anything seems possible, and gardeners make big plans. I certainly do, and this year those plans include moving and removing plants, consolidating plant groupings, making new partnerships and finishing areas that have languished in transitional states for years.
Getting even part of that work done means dealing with certain realities. I love to garden at any time of the day or night, but my body clock revs me up early in the mornings and hits me with a slump at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Therefore, this year’s resolution is to take on uninspiring or ambitious jobs in the morning, even if I have to get up a bit earlier and do them in small time increments before the start of the work day. It is both axiomatic and frustrating that garden writers are forced to be indoors tapping on a keyboard at the times when they would most like to be outdoors bearing down on the weeds.
Between the voices of my plants and the voices in my own head, it is getting very noisy this spring. It is a good thing that fresh air, sunshine and the feel of the warming soil inevitably work together to meld all those voices into one exuberant spring song.