A brief accounting of bloom

Notes for my spring garden April 2024

We have reached the green mist phase of spring, but I’ll bet by the end of the weekend the woods will have fully identifiable leaves. The first tranche of daffodils is nearly finished, and the second blooming species have appeared. The third lies back, waiting for their turn. I have some magenta hyacinths whose color is spectacular, but planted too far apart, so they have little impact. Need more and in bigger clumps.

Also need more clumps of daffodils, and more multi-colored croci under the trees around the big rock. No, I don’t like the correct plural form for crocuses either, but I force myself to use it. The New York Times crossword puzzle seems obsessed with it, along with an obscure variety of bacteria which uses most of the same letters.

The rabbits and/or deer have been very close to the house and eating the few tulips I bother planting.

As soon as it’s safe to plant—the rule around here is Memorial Day—I will buy three to five to seven bleeding hearts to fill in various spring places. They die back to the ground when they are spent, but they grow back with increasing fury each year, and send emissaries into unpredicted locations. I like that. Not everyone does.

We will be redoing the plantings around the house this year. Plan as yet undetermined, but we will retain the two unspectacular looking Korean Spice Viburnum, which give off the most beautiful perfume in the world. The quince should bloom today or tomorrow. It’s a plant I rescued from the dregs of the garden when we moved here. Not only does it thrive, but it has spawned two new sibling bushes right next to it.

We will also need to replace the five fruit trees we have lost these past years. They were elderly apples and crabapples, and the reason we call the flat grassy portion of our property “the orchard”. I have to decide what varietals I want. Not those hybrid decorative ones with no fruit, that’s for sure. I may switch to cherries.

The hostas are well on their way, shooting their rolled up leaves like sharpened spears. Luckily the deer have many other tender things to eat. I have surrounded my hostas with allium aflatunense, a beautiful blooming relative of the onion which deer detest. I think we planted over a hundred to add to previous years’. There is also a different, larger variety of allium whose name I don’t recall, but involves a variant of the word “gigantic”. The allium are only partially successful as deterrents, but they are beautiful and they reproduce like crazy. I supplement with packets of blood meal on metal spikes. These work, so long as I keep Eli from eating them—the blood meal packets, not the spikes.

I see the invasive garlic mustard is showing its ugly face. I will need to dispatch the little bastards before they send out seeds. Like writing, gardening requires ruthlessness.

The pileated woodpecker is on a tree just outside my window, and is fully capable of bringing the whole thing down, should he so choose. One of his smaller red-headed cousins just flew off the tree, perhaps having had the same thought. A week or so ago my husband pointed out a hole in one of our trees, the kind that would come from an explosive bullet. It was not a bullet hole. It was the work of a pileated woodpecker.

The blue scilla, which are everywhere, are just about finished, but the bluebells will be next, and they will be spectacular. Then the lilacs, which were heavily pruned last year. It was for their benefit, and they will thrive later, but I will grieve them. Then, slowly, the first burst of spring will subside, and the irises will bloom while I distractedly pause on my walks with the dogs to deadhead daffodils. Then the lilies of the valley—one of my favorites—and finally the peonies in June before the rest of the garden kicks into its summer routine: the astilbe, the centaurea, the delphiniums, the obedience plants (never has anything been more inaptly named), the phlox, the black-eyed susans, and the rest. Oh, and the lilies! How I love the lilies! I coddle them with metal supports and place extra blood meal packets around them, and have so far succeeded. I plan to transplant lilies of the valley to the beds around the terrace so we will have both the scent and their mad capacity for spreading.

But best of all, the crabapples are in bud, and it looks like a good year. Glory.