It happens every year of course, but it’s still fairly amazing when the lawn goes from frozen white to flowy green, and the trees from bare fingers to fluffy gloves, in so short a time. I start seeds indoors in March in perfect confidence that this will happen, and then it does, and I’m amazed all over again. This is an important part of why I love having four seasons – the sheer strangeness of it, for all its familiarity. It’s a cliche and a revelation all at once. When I lived in California and missed the seasons, people would say, oh but you can drive from lawn to snow and back again here all in one day. This completely missed the point. Going somewhere else and finding it different is hardly a surprize. Waking up to it in your own yard is.

Once the trees that bloom on bare branches have strewn their pink and white in profligate manner for a couple of weeks, it’s time for new leaves, on them as well as on the other trees. The bright bunchiness of new leaves can make the trees look full of yellow flowers, and makes me think of some lines by Robert Frost: “Nature’s first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold.” But as he goes on to sound a cautionary note about the passage of time and I am not in such a mood, I won’t quote the whole poem. Frost is the perfect name if you’re going to write a cautionary poem about spring. You can find it here, if you are in that mood:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nothing-gold-can-stay

and page down a bit.

Another cool plant emerging in the woods now is the mayapple. My first year here, I pulled up some towering garlic mustard and found a forest of foot-high green umbrellas hiding underneath. Each plant had a single leaf but there was a thick patch of them, and they really looked creepy. Sinister. I had no idea what they were, so I posted a photo to Ann Arbor’s Natural Area Preservation facebook page and they identified it for me, along with their compliments on the garlic mustard removal. Mayapple. On further inspection each leaf had a dainty white flower under it, sort of like a lonely apple blossom; but the entire plant was poisonous. So my initial impression was correct: sinister. It’s interesting to think that we have some kind of inborn recognition system for dangerous plants, and intriguing to wonder who decided to undercut that native wisdom with a perhaps cynically chosen name.

I have to say this for garlic mustard – it is well named. Pull even the tiniest seedling of it and you smell the garlic on your hands. I make the most progress by starting at the west edge of the property, and clearing the garlic mustard as thoroughly as I can going east. That way, though I still get seed blowing in from neighbors to the west and seedlings come up ridiculously thick at that edge of the woods, there are few seeds launching from the middle of my woods to continue eastward. The patches peter out there. But it’s important to try to establish something else when the garlic mustard comes out, to give future seeds less purchase. I’m trying an assortment, in addition to the catmint, plumbago, and lamium I’ve already mentioned, and will report on what works best.

Knowing that garlic mustard was imported deliberately as a salad herb, I once tried picking young, tender leaves and putting them in a salad. Blech. I also tried a garlic mustard pesto recipe. Blech again. I suppose it might do if you had no actual garlic. Why didn’t they just plant garlic in their gardens?

Happily, the more I curate my strip of woodland, the less the deer linger there. I didn’t expect them to mind it being less wild, since they have been known to destroy even totally-landscaped gardens in town. Out here on the margins they do have the option of open woods, and I am extremely glad to find they prefer them. The year before last I planted two small dogwoods and the deer nearly killed them, stripping off bark as they used the trees to scratch the so-called “velvet” from their new antlers. Seems like they could at least have dropped the old antlers in my woods, in exchange. But in the fall I wrapped some protective material around the trunks and they are now recovering, even blooming a little.

The yard is so beautiful right now, it’s a pleasure to be out there even if pulling garlic mustard. Petals of crabapples and pears drift down on me while I kneel, and it’s only by getting down to ground level that I see all the wonderful, desirable things muscling their way up. I know I planted some of them in the fall, but many of my markers have been heaved up by frost or hoofed up by deer, so I’ll just have to wait and see what’s where.

lamium

I always try to get something else to establish when I pull out garlic mustard, and some of what I planted has turned out to be excellent at holding undesirables at bay: nepeta and lamium especially. Nepeta is called catmint, but my cat has informed me that the variety I’m growing is not catnip as she knows it. Lamium is called deadnettle, but I ask you, would you ever willingly plant something called deadnettle? It’s too lovely for that name.

My third confusing, but flourishing, groundcover is plumbago. In Pasadena, plumbago was a fairly tall shrub with thick clusters of pale blue flowers, which did like to sprawl but was definitely not a ground cover. It was also definitely not cold hardy – in our quindecennial frosts it either died back or died altogether, depending on how well it was rooted. How could they sell plumbago in Michigan? It turns out there is a variety called ceratostigma plumbaginoides, which is cold-hardy. It is also delightful, coming up just when needed to cover the fading daffodil leaves, and having deep blue flowers in summer and bright red leaves in fall. It’s hard to believe the two plumbagos are related. Taken together with the catmint that’s not catnip and the deadnettle that’s not dead nor nettley, I’m wondering what they were smoking when they named all these plants.

Meanwhile in the upstairs window, the tomato plants have started waving at me over the tops of their milk cartons: hello! Over here, person who calls herself a gardener! So I thinned them to one plant per container, and filled in around their stems with more dirt, almost to the cartons’ brims. They look happier now.

This weekend Doug took the chainsaw to the fallen trees, sliced them into fireplace lengths, and disengaged their tangled tops so they would no longer trap and protect the oncoming garlic mustard. Meanwhile, he was not the only woodworker on the premises. I went to the garage for some tools and caught the woodchuck in the act of, well, chucking wood. She was shredding the wooden molding at the base of the garage door, making good progress on ripping an entrance for herself. She ran away when she saw me, zipping right under the deck. Great. A nesting woodchuck. I sprayed some deer/rabbit repellent around the garage door, hoping she will find the smell of it as repellent as I do. Then I called the other resident woodworker over for a consultation; he said the woodchuck was nowhere near getting inside. Yet.

As of today she hasn’t been back to work on the garage, but this reminded me to check the garden fence for security breaches. I found a few. Some of them might, charitably, be blamed on weather or rust, but really most of them looked deliberate. Too small for the woodchuck, and though there’s no shortage of garden-loving critters around here, I wondered if these were failed attempts at making a bigger opening.

The possible prize growing in the garden right now is a double row of tulips. This is an experiment. It was suggested to me that, since the tomato beds are protected by the garden fence and are empty from fall through spring, I could plant tulips there and cut them for bouquets. The tulips would be done when I needed the beds for my tomato plants.

The fly in this ointment would be the squirrels, which parachute into the garden at will and sometimes eat tulips, sometimes not. Just to keep us on our toes. I’ve been watching the tulips carefully so I can beat out the squirrels. Today I gathered my first three tulips. I cut them, though some people pull them up bulb and all, which makes a pretty display in a glass vase. But I’ve noticed the squirrels are attracted by disturbed ground – no doubt hoping to steal some other squirrel’s newly-buried treasure – and since they’ve ignored the tulips so far, why risk drawing attention to them? Move along, squirrels. Nothing’s happening here.

It’s a season of overlap in the yard now. The beginnings of things wanted and unwanted come up together in the woods and need to be sorted out. Garlic mustard, low to the ground and hard to pull, mingles with the much-desired nepeta. Tiarella hides under mystery weeds. Forsythia throws its yellow arms across a mess of nettles.

This year there’s an added layer of confusion due to our huge windstorm: the remains of the broken tree, sawed randomly by Edison to get it off the wire, were dropped in tangled chunks onto what was then a lot of dead mulchy leaves. But soon that spot will be an arena for ferns and lilies-of-the-valley to fight their way through skunk cabbage and motherwort. I want very much to weigh in on the fern and lily side of that argument, but the interlaced arms and fingers of the fallen treetop are really going to be in my way.

I didn’t know the name of the weed called motherwort until about half an hour ago. It wasn’t something I had to deal with in my Pasadena garden, and though I’ve learned a few names – garlic mustard, stinging nettle – from the common complaints of other gardeners here, this plant was still anonymous to me. So, what was it?

It turns out when you google “Michigan weed finder” you get a list of marijuana dispensaries in the state. But, like a true weed, I persevered, and “noxious” weed finder did the trick. Some of the finders supplied were pretty useless – the latin name? If I knew the latin name, would I be searching through the traits in your plant finder? It seemed hopeless until I remembered it had a square stem, so it was probably some kind of mint. After a brief detour through money management and the history of coinage, there it was, mystery solved: motherwort. Sounds vaguely insulting. It’s said to have medicinal properties. If anyone would like to gather several dozen bushels of it for their health, please let me know.

Looks like nothing’s happening as I walk into the room, but a peek down into the milk cartons reveals that the tomato seeds have been busy in their cozy new dirt homes. Hello, tomato plantlets, waving your cotyledons at me! Spring is here; can bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches be far behind? Well, yes, but not very far behind.

Since I can never believe all the seeds will sprout, I have planted two or three to a carton and when they get a little bigger I will have to thin them. This will make me sad for a bit, but a gardener is always making judgements: thou shalt live; thou shalt die; thou art a weed; thou art worthy of a place at the table. Not to mention interlopers causing trouble. No wonder our creation story starts us out in a garden.

In Pasadena we had a killing frost about once every 15 years, so the tomato plants would keep right on going through the fall. Being lovers of heat and light, they were a sad and scraggly lot come December; and being annuals, they had exhausted themselves by then. It was hard to face that I had to pull them up, but the fruit they bore in winter had sunk to a hothouse-like ghost of its former glory. I gave them an honored place in my tiny compost pile, and in turn they nourished the next year’s crop.

I have also started some basil indoors, and will sow some directly outside. This is a ploy to keep it coming, since I use it as a landscaping plant and therefore let it flower and go to seed. The flower stalks of basil are really lovely and very attractive to bees, so it’s a shame not to let them go; but then it’s a shame not to have any more fresh basil to eat. Planting successive waves of it satisfies both the landscape and the kitchen.

Sooner than usual this year, the ground is thawing out and spring plants are taking advantage. This includes a lot of Michigan weeds I still haven’t learned to recognize, a fair amount of incipient garlic mustard which I do, sadly, recognize, and, happily, lots of narcissus. The yellow ones that were first up have been joined by many friends. I see the lavender I planted between batches of them, though not in new growth yet, will need to be pruned back. Lamium, sturdiest of groundcovers, reasserts itself; nubs begin to swell on the forsythia (Spring’s Yellow Telegram – how does the rest of that poem go?); fingers of peony leaf, red instead of green, reach out of the bare dirt and scratch the air.

There’s a lot of deadfall to clear from the small wooded area out back, including the better part of a tree hacked down by Edison as it dangled, mid-air, across a cable, threatening more damage when we’d barely escaped from the Big Power Outage. It’s still in large chunks, but will make good firewood if Doug’s chainsaw is up to the task.

I patrol the yard and garden, thinking of different schemes for all those seedlings soon to sprout in my upstairs window. I am learning to landscape with herbs, since they seem to repel the deer, the squirrels, and even the woodchuck. Miraculous basil, worthy of its royal name.

Speaking of squirrels, I have an update on my peanut-butter-and-hot-spiced-birdseed feeder. Among the squirrels there’s one that’s very, very fat even for a Michigan Gigunda Squirrel, by which I assume he has advanced food-gathering techniques. I noticed him lurking near the feeder at various times during the day, but never saw him on it until near dinnertime one day. By that hour the birds had eaten most of the seeds, but a lot of the peanut butter was still in place; and Mr. Gigunda climbed boldly up, reached out his little gray hands, and scraped all the remaining peanut butter into his mouth. I didn’t see the days in between when he figured this out, but it seems when the seeds are gone, the hot pepper goes with them. Once he was down to the peanut butter he was in the clear. And that’s okay with me. I’m happy to let Mr. Gigunda have the peanut butter as long as he lets the birds have the seeds.

For an interesting look at what your weeds can tell you about your soil, try this: Weeds as Indicator Plants . Although they could also be telling you what kinds of seeds spilled out of your birdfeeder.

Our power was out for five days, but like birds in spring it did come back at last. We cleaned out the fridge, and my thoughts turned to starting tomato seeds.

First step was to set up long folding tables in front of the big, sunny windows in my upstairs guest room, with trays on them to catch water. Next, I rounded up my collection of milk cartons. We began collecting the empty half gallon paper cartons in late summer, slicing off the tops, washing them out, and tossing them into a tub and a box in the garage, along with a few smaller containers. I carted these upstairs, and sat down to make drainage holes by sticking in a paring knife and twisting it, four holes per carton.

I filled the now-empty collection tub with a bag of potting soil. I’ve experimented with various types of potting soils and seed-starting mixes, and for me regular potting soil gets the best result. Seed-starting soil is very fine, and I have trouble keeping it around the roots of the seedlings when I plant them out in the garden. You should, however, test this with your own style of gardening, because you might easily have different results.

Any bag of potting soil that’s been sitting around a Michigan warehouse in winter will be pretty dry, so once it was in the tub I added a potful of water, and stirred it with my trusty trowel. I went down to the kitchen and fixed a cup of tea, to give it time to soak in.

Next, since this session was strictly for tomatoes, I filled the milk cartons only
about a third of the way up with dirt. Which is the same as soil, but once I’m getting my hands in it I think of it as dirt. Soiling yourself is what babies do in their diapers. Getting dirty means you’re having fun.

Now at last, time to plant the tomato seeds. I set the cartons in the trays on the tables and planted two or three seeds in each. Ten milk cartons fit in a tray, and I like to have each tray seeded with one variety of tomato. Unfortunately, we were late starting on our carton collecting this year and I ran out before I could start the cherry tomatoes, but I’ll find something else for them. If you’ve ever had tomato vines in your garden that flopped over and sat there for a while before you tried to tie them up, you will have discovered that tomato stems put out roots wherever they touch the ground. As the seedlings grow I will fill in around their stems with more dirt. By the time they are out the top of the carton they will have nice big sturdy root systems underneath.

Last step: watering them, then standing back to admire my work. The cartons look very cheerful peering out the window, and they look cheerful from outside, too. My neighbor says she knows its spring when she sees them up there. I know it’s spring when they start to grow.

Sometimes the state of things and my state of being really line up. Wednesday, trash pickup day on our street, started innocently enough, no blizzard, no thunder, nothing to keep Doug from rolling the big, heavy green trashcan out to the street and carting the recycle bins full of plastic and paper to join them. He left for work, and I curled up in my chair by the window with a cup of tea, nursing the remnants of a cold.

But on Wednesday our strange, warm February weather collided with “a big blob of arctic air” (technical term used by local meteorologist) and produced what Detroit Edison is calling a “once-in-a-century weather event.” As I alternately nodded off and woke up, the bins went for a wild ride down the street, were kindly returned by a neighbor, and blew away again. Trees whipped around, tossing random bits of themselves across the yard. Wind gusts peaked at 68 miles per hour. By the time it was over, we and roughly one million other people across the southeastern corner of Michigan were without power. We had cell phone signal and so could check for news updates. Edison, usually prompt and fairly accurate with predicted repair times, made a blanket statement that they had no idea when they’d get this sorted out. Their first priority was to pick up all the downed lines draped across roads; then get power to first responders and health care sites. Ordinary homes would only come after that. Doug walked up and down the street collecting the trash bins, and we went to bed early.

In the morning the house was cold. Not cold as in, the pipes might burst, but cold as in, fifty degrees, with no way to make tea. I headed to the library, which I knew to have a coffeeshop, functioning heat, bathrooms, power outlets, and books to read. Half the neighborhood seemed to have the same idea, but it’s a big library.

You might think, as I did think, that I’d have been more comfortable in my semi-recovered state if I could have stayed home. But when I was home I felt the press of things I should have been doing, though I lacked the energy to do them. Now – I couldn’t do them! In my normal mode I’d probably have found this frustrating, but as it was my lack of energy lined up neatly with my house’s lack of power. The timing was strangely right.

When I went back to check on the house – before we got a nice warm hotel room for the night – I noticed these daffodils blooming. The earliest of my bulbs have never bloomed before late March until now. Did the flowers really push up out of the ground, or did the wind blow several inches of dirt off of them?

In honor of February being National Bird Feeding Month, and last weekend in particular the Great Backyard Bird Count, my Garden Group hatched a plan to make bird feeders as lures. This seemed like cheating to me – would these birds come to your party without the bribe? Are you really that popular? Our gal Sally had a simple design for us, made of a paper plate in a plastic holder, smeared with peanut butter, sprinkled with birdseed, and suspended with three pieces of cord from whatever likely spot there was to hang it from.

All very well, but the real problem with bird feeders is the gate crashers. Squirrels. Ann Arbor, a city proudly full of trees, abounds with native Michigan Gigunda Squirrels. These guys are the heftiest, fattest squirrels I’ve ever seen – I suspect them of being cross-bred with woodchucks. For unknown reasons, and in spite of their short legs, small ears, and lack of grace, they are called Fox Squirrels. I put my bird feeder outside my window and waited.

First to find the goods were the chickadees. Beside themselves with joy, they blasted in and out of the seedy landing pad, which barely swayed under their weight. Then the fox squirrel showed up. He climbed the little shepherd’s crook with only slight trouble, but when he went for the paper plate it tipped up, swung wildly, and though he attempted to recover through some impressive acrobatics, dumped him on the ground. It was really entertaining, and he tried twice more before giving up. As planned, the peanut butter kept the seeds on the plate for the birds.

But soon after that a small red squirrel came along, and being about half the size of the Gigunda was more successful. Time for plan B. I reloaded the plate with seed laced with red pepper flakes. Mr. Red snuck up, grabbed a pawful, ate it, ran off, and did not come back. Chili peppers taste like that so mammals will leave them alone, and let the birds, which can’t taste hot pepper, disperse their seeds far and wide. The chickadees seemed happy to collaborate in this scheme. I don’t know how happy the squirrel was.