Winter work

"Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do - or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so."

Stanley Crawford

Yesterday was a day to give a gardener spring fever-- calm, warm and dry. After 30 years of Seattle gardening, it still takes me by surprise how early our plants start growing. This week the hyacinths, alliums and daffodils are just popping up through the mulch. (To my family and friends in the Midwest and Rockies, above picture is proof.) Depending on the weather, it will still be several weeks before the first flowers, but in the meantime it sure lifts the heart and gets you moving. Here's a line from a poem called "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

For all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things...

So beautiful-- I think about that line every spring when I first go out. But the DARK side of an early spring is you have to stay ahead of the weeds, or all the pretty little things are soon choked out.

I've been on sort of a rip in the yard, sawing down some old, ugly shrubs and cleaning out beds for a fresh start. If you like to buy plants, you have to do this occasionally. But for a gentle person, I'm surprised at my own violent housecleaning! Yesterday I got out a ladder and started "pruning" a big overgrown photinia, then decided it would be easier to just chop the dang thing down. And so I did, and I was glad because I could see all that new light on my favorite flower bed.