Spring Has Sprung
An anonymous poem that I love goes like this:
Spring has sprung
The grass has riz
I wonder where the flowers is.
This spring, after years of sporadic failures to start a garden, I decided to throw it all overboard and plant flowers instead.
I should love vegetable gardening. I’m an organic vegetable kind of guy. I eat buckets of vegetables every week. I live on free-range chicken, venison and wild fowl. I put dandelions in my hair.
Okay, I’m kidding about the dandelions. But you get the idea.
I decided to go with roses as my major focus because through every season, the girlfriend has a bouquet of fresh roses on her kitchen table and that spot of color, even when snow is raging against the windows and ice covers the road to her house, is a tonic against all that is dark in the world.
But first you have to plant them. So in early May I bought 10 bareroot rosebush plants, two climbing creepers and a purple clematis and carefully placed them in the ground. With exquisite timing that I still marvel at, the temperature bottomed out that night and killed the creepers and clematis as if they’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen. What followed then was a more or less daily inspection of my dormant rosebushes to see if they’d been frozen, too. It was like looking for signs of life in a graveyard.
Every other day or so I’d walk to my garden and carefully examine the bare – and slowly browning – branches. Then, two weeks later, the temperature cratered again. I awoke to four inches of snow in mid May that lingered for the next several days. I could almost feel my rosebushes shivering. Another week went by and still I could find no sign of life, nothing that would indicate my rose garden would amount to anything other than a collection of dead plants.
But you know what? Even in Montana spring arrives. One day, on my rounds, I spotted a tiny spot of reddish brown on the thorny limb of one of my rosebushes. I bent over for a closer look. It was warm, and had been for several days. There, reaching for the sun, was a bud! And the next day there were more! My rosebushes had made it through. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but maybe I’m a gardener after all.
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