Our gardens might best demonstrate the annual cycle of the seasons.
We consider Spring as the season when plant shoots resurface, or leaves start to unfurl and cover naked limbs and branches.
Summer, to us, is the joyous and showy display of colors and forms in flowers and the happy look and growth of leaves.
Fall is the vibrant displays of reds and oranges and yellows as deciduous plants make their Swan Lake show of glory.
Winter is the unveiling of forms and shapes of naked branches and trunks or the display of purity of white snow blanketing the landscape.
For most plants in a four-season location like ours, there's a season of renewal, showy displays, kaleidoscopically colorful holding-on to foliage, and a resigned state of long slumber from life-giving photosynthesis.
In the tropics, the entire year barely shows the life cycle of plants within one year. Entire year round is blooming and leafing and growing period in the Philippines and other tropical places.
We find our gardens might best demonstrate the annual cycle of the seasons.
Spring, where we live in the northwest Pacific coast of North America, is the busiest time in our garden. Spring into Spring gardening sounds like a promising idea. And it's even just winter really.
We like to catch the first signs of garden growth as we survey our slumbering garden which is also rearing to spring back from dormancy. We take note of the little fingers of the first green leaves clawing out of the frosted dirt.
Reinhardt, Paisley, and Perseus on garden watch
With our three Siberian Forest house cats (Reinhardt, Paisley, and Perseus), we'd spend most of the sunny daytime puttering around the garden. We see mounds of dead leaves and browned twigs and stalks begging to be raked and dumped onto our compost pile in the backyard. We cut down broken branches and prune unruly shrubs.
We let our rakes claw the moss from the lawn and we put them into green mounds, waiting to be wheelbarrowed to the compost pile.
Spring is the best time to give the garden much needed haircut and sprucing up.
Over a brief time, our compost pile rises to a great height and spreads.
Then we find time to enjoy what our garden has to offer.
Snowdrops are reliable mid-winter floral display, with their snow-white nodding head heralding the coming of Spring
We quickly notice the snowdrops. They are one of the first to spring out. Their long, slender leaves differentiate themselves from the grass by their size: bigger and thicker. As the name suggests, snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) are one of the first to bloom. They even grow and bloom while the ground is covered in snow in February depending on where they sprout. Their nodding white flowers, though small, make us smile as we walk around our late winter garden.
The snowdrops’ white nodding flowers, a week before they open, remind us of the heads of white swans atop slender necks.
Then when the snowdrops peter off, we delight in the iridescent magenta of winter crocuses taking over the late winter garden show.
Flowers come in diverse sizes, from diminutive to in-your-face big.
The Christmas hellebore is one of the first flowering plants to show off blooms that are large, saucer sized. They even bloom as early as Christmas time, thus their name.
We can already see the signs of tulips and daffodils and hyacinths inching out of the soil. We love looking at their pointy tongue-like greenness. The first few leaves are fat and vibrant chartreuse green.
I spot little creamy-greenish bumps nudging out from the tips and the sides of the branches of deciduous trees and shrubs. Those of the dwarf and weeping Japanese maple tree look like reddish hooves.
A green revolution is in the offing. In a couple of weeks, these bumps will unfurl into tiny leaves if caressed by a steady stream of warm air and a daily dose of sunshine. They will be frostbitten and will darken to their premature death if another one of those freak snowfalls sweeps in next week.
With our house cats on the lead, we turn into a little treasure hunt in our home garden early in the year. We search for perennial plants that start poking up from the soil.
The search is made more fun and easier as the cats sniff at new leaves coming out from the deep brown soil of our various garden beds and berms. We use the cats like one hunting for truffle use pigs to detect the super-expensive fungi underground. Animals have a far superior sense of smell than humans.
We longingly eye the little buds of the winter witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). We wish we could make each open a tad earlier. It’s just the middle of winter, we know, but we can’t wait for spring to hurry up in marching in.
Spring marching in always brings the dormant deciduous perennials to a wakeful presence with new shoots and baby leaves. Tiny fresh blades of the ornamental grasses start stretching up from their winter hibernation.
And in our little treasure hunt in our garden, we notice the oh-so-many surprises of transient plants opening residences in odd places. We see a few tulip leaves poking through the lawn. We didn’t plant the bulbs there. The squirrels did. The poor squirrels must have forgotten — again — where they hid part of their autumn harvest.
Tulips are not normally early bloomers. But we can force a few tulips to bloom as early as the last week of February. The earliest types are miniature tulips. We can start them indoors in pots to really get a head start. We bring them outdoors when the danger of frost is gone.
Or we place the potted tulips where strong direct sunlight can warm the bulbs enough to encourage earlier growth and blooming, like by a south-facing windowsill. We can also leave the tulips in pots outdoors in the sun and bring them indoors before the frosty late afternoon temperature encroaches. This sounds like a lot of work, but early miniature tulips are worth the big effort.
If we get a bit lazy and very impatient, store-bought tulips come in handy. Nurseries have effectively tinkered around with the life and blooming cycle of tulips and other plants.
Heathers, the winter heathers specifically (Erica x darleyensis or could be Erica Carnea) can give us a good start in blooms. In our garden, our winter heathers hint at their floral display as early as late December. Soon, clouds of magenta, pink and white cover the winter heathers. We plant heathers along the roadside where passers-by can enjoy their early blooms as much as we do. Heathers ring in spring.
We plant store-bought primulas where we want some semblance of full floral display. Next to the budding heather, they look good for several weeks.
Although snowdrops are tiny at less than a foot tall, they look prominent since few flowers are around yet to overshadow their diminutive but elegant presence. So, we plant a sweeping drift of snowdrops for better effect.
Most early bloomers are tiny and short, but they clearly compensate for what they lack in stature with their ability to present an early flower show. They gain attention when there are few other blooms to compete with or eclipse them.
The hellebores, however, are an exception to the small flowers of early bloomers.
Hellebores nigra shows off saucer-size blooms.
And even before their blooms add much welcome to the winter garden, the hellebores’ serrated evergreen leaves break the monotony of an expanse of drab dirt and browned leaves remaining from the previous fall. The crisp, glossy green leaves of the hellebores can be pretty attention-grabbers.
We plant a generous stand of hellebores by your carport so when we step out of our car, we get that feel of greenness despite and amidst the sad-looking lawn and even-more-sad-looking garden beds of sleeping deciduous plants.
We plant a sizeable patch of hellebores to perk up the front of our garden or near the driveway so we can see the glossy, serrated leaves and the flowers up close.
Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, is the first of the hellebores to flower. It usually blooms in January and even occasionally as early as Christmas. The Christmas rose bears large, round, white flat-faced flowers above low-growing mounds of leathery, deep green foliage.
Yes, when winter is holding on too long and we are all growing weary of our gray days and cold rains, and even the cold specter of snow, our hellebores come into bloom as sure picker upper.
And we know the upcoming season will truly be the gardeners' delight and pride. We sow hope and look forward to our floral harvest.
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