What I Love Most About a Garden in the Spring
While Fall is the best time for planting (in the south), Spring to me is the time I most enjoy walking around a garden. The weather is cool, there are no mosquitos and moisture levels are high enough that you don’t have to worry about watering anything except the most recently planted plants.
What I love most about a garden in the spring is seeing all of the emerging growth…stems pushing out of the ground or leaf buds on a tree or shrub literally exploding with new growth. In my own garden, it is like old friends returning home after a long winter vacation. I am emotionally attached to these plants and it warms my heart to see them return. With our wet winters and periodic cold snaps, there is always a chance they don’t make it through the winter. So on one level, I am relieved (especially with new plantings) to see that they made it through winter in one piece.
Beyond survival and reappearing, I am continuously amazed with just how fast plants grow in the spring. They are like a coiled spring, waiting to use the sugar reserves in their roots to explode with new growth. Over the last few years, the plant that has been the best example of this in my garden is Bottlebrush Buckeye. Between March 20th, when it’s new branches were just swollen buds starting to open, and today (April 9), its largest branches have put on 17” of growth. This is for a 4 year old plant that was only 3.5’ tall as of March 20th. This is more than it will grow for the next 6 months. Besides amazement at the vigor of growth, I suspect part of my positive feelings towards seeing plants emerge and grow in spring is being proud of how they are doing. As a gardener (aka plant parent), I feel proud when the plants that I put out into the world are doing well…whether it be plants in my personal garden or a garden I’ve installed for a client.
The last aspect of springtime growth that I love is seeing plants spread. There is a saying that a plant isn’t truly established in a site until it shows that it can reproduce. I suppose this is like saying that a child hasn’t fully matured until they are married and have started their own family. I love it when I see my rhizomatic or stoloniferous spreaders popping up just a bit further than last year’s clump…my Virginia Sweetspire is starting to get adventurous. Best of all is seeing plants reseed. Some plants, which depend on gravity to drop their seeds are neater and appear more predictably around existing plants. Others, which are spread via wind, insects or birds seem to pop up in the most random places. I feel that this adds a bit of surprise to my springtime walks in the garden…where will celandine poppy appear this week? As plants start spreading, a garden enters it’s next phase…when it starts designing itself. At that point, a gardener’s role changes from ensuring the survival of a planting to editing/managing the spread of the plants within the planting…but this is a topic for another day.
