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Spring is a great week in New England. This adage, hilarious as it is unfair, is one I like to toss around during these first few weeks of April, when the lenten gray of the season is still squatting over us like a malevolent spirit. It’s a time when, as Auden says, we have to “practice the scales of rejoicing” going through the motions of hope and expectation even when there’s very little tangible evidence of the green season soon to come.
In my own gardens, March has been a frustrated and labor-intensive stretch. Well-meaning landscapers accidentally folded the liner of CCA’s new wildlife pond over on itself, resulting in a slow drain that can only be addressed by wading bodily in and uncoiling the mess by hand. My home garden’s new, smaller pond has also been emptying by a few inches every time it’s filled, presumably because I managed to mess up that liner in some undetectable way as well. The warm surge we experienced at the beginning of March has vanished, replaced by ubiquitous low clouds, rain, and wind that have cooled the soil down and stymied germination. The orchard remains brown and dormant, the wildflower beds are colorlessly motionless, and even the snowdrops refuse to show themselves.
But these generalized discouragements vanish when I look a little closer. April is a month of agonizing subtleties. The redemption of a New England spring is that you get back what you pay in small but remarkable treasures. A quick walk around my home garden shows me a phalanx of shoots breaking through the ground like the points of acid-green spears. Tulips, autumn joy sedum, salvia, catmint. The dwarf daffodils I planted along the yard's edges last year are coming out, their egg-yolk yellow luminous in the morning rain. At school, in the orchard, each tree has thrust out clusters of white buds fringed with hairs as delicate as down, an early signal of flowers that will fill the whole field with perfume in just a few weeks. And, walking out to check on our hideous fledgling pond this morning, I watched a mallard hen descend from flight and crash into the cool water. She didn’t care that the liner was billowing around, leering its plastic eye at her as she swam. She preened and sang, at home in the place we’d made for her.
April is the time of miraculous transformation. If experience hadn’t conditioned us to expect all that happens this month, we’d be staggered by it. Thirty days from now, the trees will be in leaf, the flowers in bloom, and the grass underfoot in an ardent green. It’s an annual eucatastrophe, a reminder that a little light goes a long way.
In the meantime, there are things to do. It’s the busiest month of the year for the gardener.
1/ Divide and Move Herbaceous Perennials
Herbaceous perennials, which die back to the ground every year but then return come spring, renewing their whole life cycle each year, are the bread and butter of most flower gardeners. Stalwarts like catmint, salvia, black-eyed Susan, and coneflower are not only versatile, they’re highly amenable to being divided and moved. I started out with only a modest tuft of catmint in my garden six years ago, and now have at least sixteen large plants. Any perennial that grows in a spreading mat rather than around a single taproot can be lifted this time of year, hacked into multiple pieces, and moved around. This season, when the new growth has barely started to show, is the perfect time to do so, changing your planting scheme if you want, multiplying and giving plants away, and generally playing the game of garden design. The best part is that, if you don’t like the way it all turns out, you can move it around next April. But good gardeners don’t hesitate to axe something if it isn’t working.
2/ Sow and Harden Off Herbs
The first and best thing to grow in your garden is an abundance of herbs. Once you’ve tasted—literally and figuratively—the joy of popping out the kitchen door to grab a handful of fresh parsley still wet with last night’s rain, you’ll start to viciously resent the idea of paying four dollars for a little plastic box of herbs at the grocery store. This far north, we can’t have fresh herbs twelve months a year, but we can manage nine or ten with careful planning. This is therefore the time of year to sow lots of herb seeds, germinate them under a grow light or in a sunny window, prick them out once they’re big enough to handle, water them, grow them into good seedlings, and start hardening them off. It’s a trial-and-error process that will involve plenty of mistakes and, if all else fails, you can always go to the garden store next month and spend a fortune on seedlings. But better to get the hang of doing it at home and save lots of money.
Any advice for growing from seed? Leave a comment below and tell us your best tricks for sewing and growing spring veggies and herbs.
3/ Buy, Display, and Re-Plant Bulbs
We long for color this time of year, and it’s tempting to line the porch and window boxes with pansies, whose cheerful, painted faces are as bright as they are hearty. But though there is certainly a place for pansies, I’ve learned to favor spring bulbs over the years. Grabbing loose packs of daffodils, muscari, snowdrops, ditch iris, and tulips is a relatively cheap way to create bright and long-lasting potted displays. And it has the superlative benefit that, once the bulbs have faded and May is in full bloom, you can transfer those bulbs into the ground in your garden, where they will bloom again next year. In this way, my wife and I have accumulated a huge collection of spring bulbs at home, adding to the collection each year for less than the price we would have paid for annual potted plants which would have had to be composted once the fireworks were over. Just make sure not to cut off the green foliage of any of the bulbs you keep, since they need those leaves to gather nutrition for next year’s flowers. Either let the bulbs stay in their pots in an out-of-the-way place until the leaves turn brown, or plunk them in the ground with the greenery still sticking out.
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Lovely. I’m longing to see all the fruits of your labor and continue to count on your beautiful writing to carry me through until more pictures arrive.