A gardener is always happy to see the flowers on blueberry bushes, tomato vines, and squash plants that will grow into good things to eat. It’s a joy, but mainly a practical consideration.

Up here on my deck where I will see them all the time, I’ve planted flowers whose whole point is to be beautiful. They are attractive to bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies, yes, but more modest flowers would please those pollinators just as well.

There’s evidence that people have valued flowers for more than producing food, for thousands of years. Traces of flowers have been found in paleolithic tombs. There are very few drawings of flowers in cave art, but once we get to the age of agriculture flowers are everywhere: in murals, reliefs, jewelry designs, pottery, and then in our oldest, most sacred texts. “I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley” says one Testament; “Behold the lilies of the field,” says the other, “not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

They’re not talking about useful date palms or parables of vineyards here. They’re talking about beauty, specifically useless beauty, in the expectation that readers will agree. Did early hunter-gatherers have no time to stop, while searching for food, to pay attention to the inedible? It takes time, as Georgia O’Keefe said, to see something small like a flower. Or maybe they did see, love, and gather them, but being flowers no trace of them stayed behind.

Why do we see beauty anywhere, in flowers or anywhere else?

 The Theory of Art

“All art is quite useless.”
Oscar Wilde

Outside the march of progress,
it lifts you from your feet,
a burst of unpurposed joy
that cures no cancer,
builds no instrument,
leads you only to yourself,
forgetting the artist,
ink, paper, paint, clay,
free of their practical callings,
like dolphins pulsing from the sea,
not to save you from drowning,
not to show you the way,
just dancing,
because the elements are there.

I love the way Maria Newman set this poem of mine to music. You can listen to it here.

Of course there are more weeds. They come back, sometimes with a vengeance. Many sources claim that weeds tell you about conditions in your soil, but there’s a lot of confusion around what they’re trying to say. Goldenrod and ox-eyed daisies are supposed to grow in wet, poorly drained soil, but they love my sandy, dry, fast-draining yard. I do like these two, but do they know that? Goldenrod lights up the end of summer, and ox-eyed daisies make excellent bouquets. The daisies get very happy standing in a vase of water all week, soggy at last.

Plantain, said to indicate clay soils, grows in the sandy stuff right next to the ox-eyed daisies; Queen Anne’s lace is supposed to like poor soil, but out along the road edges here it grows mixed in with chicory, which is supposed to indicate rich soil. More interesting is the claim for dandelions, which grow in compacted soil but get right to work loosening it up.

I’ve always pulled and tossed purslane, but having recently come across a trove of new purslane recipes  here  I may bring some of it into the kitchen and give it a try. And I was surprised to learn that woodruff is sometimes considered a weed. I like it as a groundcover, twining with the lamium.

So, for weeding, first you have to decide which are the weeds, retaining the right to reclassify as you go along. Then, remember weeding is an ongoing practice, not an event with a beginning and an end. It’s lovely to sit and enjoy a garden at the end of the day, but the real pleasure is in the gardening.

The lawns of my suburban childhood were planted with a mix of grass and white clover. I remember being told this was because clover “fixes nitrogen,” which made me wonder what was wrong with it. You had to be very careful walking through the clover because it was full of bees, and since bees were said to be busy, I figured they were busy helping the clover fix nitrogen.

Bees or not, the best thing about clover was spending long afternoons looking through it for four-leafers. If you found a four leaf clover you had good luck and – in our neighborhood’s culture – you got to make a wish.

Having the internet right handy as I write, I looked this up: the probability of finding a four leaf clover is one in 5,000 or 1 in 10,000.  Lucky me! In the last couple of years since I spread clover seed in the yard and garden, I have found dozens of four leaf clovers, possibly a hundred of them, plus many five-leafers and the occasional six leafer. They come from the same two clumps every time, so I’m assuming this is genetic rather than something weird going on in my garden. The tomatoes seem normal.

I bring the lucky clovers indoors, make my wishes (one per stem), and put them in small vases. When they fade and dry I collect them in this basket. I can’t tell you what I wish for, because naturally if you tell anyone, your wish will not come true. But I will say it’s ambitious, it’s in the public interest, and so far it’s making headway.

Green, everywhere green. All the plants that held back in the Michigan winter have come barreling out of the ground, pushing bricks aside, enthused by sunlight, encouraged by rain. It’s exhilarating to see the peonies and iris returning to bloom, sage flowering blue, chives purple, rudbeckia and coneflowers that will bloom later beginning to leaf up, and stalwart groundcovers holding their own. But then there are the weeds.

It takes some knowledge and much attention, to weed a bed of perennials. The first year I gardened in Michigan I pulled up all the monarda shoots, because we don’t have monarda in California and I didn’t know what it was. I had put in a couple as bedding plants, and though I was told they would self-seed I didn’t know it when I saw it. Many perennials, as they emerge in June, give little clue to their identities, leading to confusion and chagrin. I’ve started noting their positions with plant markers, metal ones with long legs so they go deep into the ground and don’t get frost-heaved out of place.

A weed, it has been said, is any plant growing where you don’t want it. I understand that chickweed can be used to feed chickens; that plantain makes a good poultice; and that purslane is human-edible. I did once try to make pesto from garlic mustard, but concluded that the colonists who brought it to these shores on purpose were unfamiliar with Italian cuisine. Weeds all; out they go.

But I actively encourage the milkweed and goldenrod, and I let the Dame’s Rocket stand and bloom. It looks like its common name, wild phlox, but unlike tame phlox the deer don’t eat it.

This is my concept of a garden, layering my sense of order and beauty onto the dirt, sun, rain, and seeds that have a sense of their own. When I move them, feed them, water them, they respond, often by trying to get back to what they were doing before I interfered. Unsure I speak their language, I try to listen to the plants. They’re the experts on what they need.

It was a good nesting site when she built it, but a little over a week after the duck settled beside our front steps, a fox moved into the backyard next door and had four kits. One morning shortly thereafter I came downstairs to find the nest abandoned uncovered, and this time I did not see Mama Duck lurking twenty or thirty feet away. When she wasn’t back in a couple of hours I went out with a stick and gently nudged the leafy-downy edges of the nest back over the eggs, hoping to help keep them warm, or at least camouflaged, till Mama Duck returned. But Mama Duck did not come back.

Doug went out and searched for signs of a struggle, but found not a single feather, neither here nor next door. The internet said a duck would abandon a nest if it sensed danger or was disturbed too often, and said the eggs were not likely viable after being abandoned for a whole day. Should we try to incubate them? Best, said the internet, to let nature take its course. The next morning the eggs were gone, too.

At least the lack of feather evidence made me think Mama Duck is safely somewhere else. My sources say she will probably build another nest soon, and try again. Mallard Ducks are still abundant, but their numbers are declining through loss of wetlands, both from climate change and from development. In other words, the real problem is my own species, not the foxes. It’s our human curse and glory that we’re so bad at letting nature take its course – great on destroying viruses, planting gardens, inventing tools, art, and cuisine. Not so great on backing off excessive improvements, or sharing the planet with other creatures. We’re willing to help, but we find it hard to get there.

Doug says next time we have a duck nesting in our yard, he’s going to sleep outside to keep it safe.

One of my tree trimmers was standing in the driveway looking startled. I went out to ask what was wrong.

“Did you know you have a duck nest under that tree?” he asked. “She flew up at me when I got close, nearly scared me to death.”

I did not know. But there it was, a nest dug into the flowerbed, lined with leaves and bits of down, with four large white eggs. I had noticed a pair of mallards strolling about my lawn a few days earlier, but I’d seen that before without seeing a nest. There’s a creek two houses over, and the river’s a little further off. I asked the tree guy if he thought he could work without hurting the nest, and he said yes. This was good, because it had taken all this time for the trimming team to come clean up our damage from February’s ice storm (everyone in town had damage from the February ice storm) and I was relieved not to have to put it off. He was as good as his word. The duck was lurking maybe twenty feet away. When the tree crew moved off to a different part of the yard, she came back and settled on the nest.

A day or two later she flew up to scare a random solicitor away – thank you, Duck – and I saw there were more eggs in the nest. Every evening before dusk she covered the nest carefully with leaf litter and down, and left for a while to feed, the nest so well camouflaged I sometimes wasn’t sure I was really looking at it (second photo). It was hard to see when she was on it, too, unless you saw her head move (third photo). The internet informed me that it was going to take a month for the eggs to hatch.

Why did she build her nest so close to the house? Because the duck knew what she was doing. Predators were unlikely to come so near the house, and people, charmed by the cuteness factor of potential baby ducklings, were willing to concede a little space for a little while. I would give up using my front door for a month. Mama Duck had taken the habitat-trashing, ecological catastrophe of the human race, and promoted us to the role of Duck Protectors.

I find I am very proud of the promotion.

When the last of the deceased tomato vines came out of the garden in November, I put my tulip bulbs in. Come April and early May the result is what Doug calls The Tulip Farm. It’s a convenient arrangement because the fence keeps the deer and rabbits out of the flowers, which are all done blooming by time to use the raised beds for tomato plants.

Every few days I go out with my flower bucket and cut a slew of Pink Impressions, Apricot Beauties, Salmon Pearls, and Darwin Whites from the garden’s largesse, and move Spring into the house.

I’ve already been picking daffodils since late March, but the thing about daffodils is, if you put them in a vase with other flowers the other flowers will die. The culprit is said to be daffodil sap, which protects them from being eaten by critters and allows me to plant them anywhere at all in the whole yard. Fierce stuff. Cut daffodils have to be sequestered in their own vase for an amount of time that depends on how fresh the daffs are and how sensitive the other flowers. Some people give them just a couple of hours, but I haven’t had such luck. To get around the timing problem and still have mixed bouquets, I use several small vases set next to each other, for example like this basket containing three medium and three small vases.

When I put my current arrangement together the two small outer vases got only daffodils, leaving the tulips and other flora in peace. A little moss covers the vase edges, and the basket pulls it all into a nice, tidy, well-balanced array for the living room.

But sometimes nice and tidy just doesn’t cut it. For those times, I get out my big crystal vase and let the tulips go wild.

My niece Cynthia once told me that when she was a small child, her mother told her these bright yellow flowering branches were named in her honor: For Cynthia. I can just hear my sister saying it, and I must add it’s an improvement on the truth. How much lovelier to have a brilliant source of cheer and hope named for a little girl, rather than for a Scottish botanist. But of course, it was the Scottish botanist who earned the privilege of horticultural immortality, through having introduced the Chinese plant to Britain. In China the fruit of forsythia was used in traditional herbal medicine to treat colds, fevers, bronchitis, and allergies, though in Britain the shrub was purely ornamental. You may be surprised to hear that forsythia has fruit. After putting all that gold into its flowers, the fruits are small, dry, and brownish, and look rather like husks of leftover sepals. Forsythia is also a member of the olive family, and doesn’t look like that either.

But they’re blooming in my backyard now, airy rocketing branches – they can grow as much as 24 inches in a year – carrying a payload of spring. Wherever a looping branch cascades back to earth and touches the ground, it can root and become a whole new bush.

Naturally, it has inspired many poets. Mary Ellen Solt’s poem is the one I always think of – an elegant example of concrete poetry. When you see some concrete poems you say to yourself, oh cute, or oh clever. With Solt’s you say of course! Perfect!

Forsythia is the gift of a moment – well, maybe two weeks, but what is that in the life of a garden? Which brings me to the other poem I think of with the first bright flowers of spring.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

    By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

We finally had someone coming to give us a quote on the broken tree clean-up, so I was out making sure my list was complete. It’s not exactly subtle out there: what’s wrong with this picture?

Are lilacs supposed to grow horizontally? Is this redbud limb having a nice meet-cute with these wooden chairs?

Still, there’s so much, it would be easy to undercount. As I inspected the fallen tops of some crabapple trees, hoping none of the gathering spring birds decided to build nests in these branches bound for the chipper, I noticed a DTE utility truck parked on the street. It had a sign I’d never seen before on its door panel: “Assaulting a utility worker is a felony.” With hotline number. I certainly never approve of assault – and isn’t any assault a felony? – but the image of DTE customers enraged by long, repeated power outages taking to the streets with pitchforks somehow seemed sad and funny at the same time. Funny, because I couldn’t really believe it would happen. Sad, because apparently it does.

Meanwhile, cheery things are also happening. Between the fallen branches the first daffodils are starting to bloom.

Indoors, my tulips are going crazy on the windowsill. I’m a little late starting my seeds. Think I’ll go do that right now.

The garden in winter has a lot to say for itself even when there doesn’t seem to be much happening. Yesterday I tossed a hard loaf of bread and some tired old pumpkins out the back door. Some birds came to the bread loaf right away, and then a deer. The deer had her back to me, but when she heard whatever tiny slight sound I made behind my window, she struck a pose I’d never seen before, and my camera was not in reach. She swiveled her neck 180 degrees, so her face was turned directly toward me, while her body stayed entirely pointed the other way. I didn’t know deer could do that; it made her neck look very long. When she moved on, I found my phone and googled “are deer related to giraffes.” The answer was – yes!

This morning I found a fuller record of visiting diners stamped into the snow: more deer hoofprints, a bunch of squirrel pawprints, and prints of a cat, but probably that was Mac from up the street, tracking the birds. The front yard recorded an activity I didn’t understand right away: what were the deer doing over where the storm had put the top half a crabapple tree on the ground? I could see the drag marks of deer walking up, and then the crisper prints of deer taking short steps and standing around. A closer look, and aha, the top of the tree, which was now the bottom of the tree, still had dried crabapples on it. I wonder if deer know to look for this after a storm, or if they just stumbled on it.

Another record of recent past events was in the sky. It’s a bright, gorgeous day today, with not a cloud in the sky. Except where jets passed through it. The sky trails of enormous birds.

Nearer to the house, spring’s spear carriers are on the job, trailblazing for the daffodils to follow. They start coming up while still covered in snow, but if snow surfaces show any signs of this I haven’t learned them yet.

And here by the front door are the faithful hellebores, living up to their common name, Lenten Roses. They gave up snow, or possibly living underground, for lent. We have a lot to do before spring – clearing off the old seedheads and brushy bits I left standing as winter shelter for small critters; getting the fallen tree off the garden fence and making anti-bunny/anti-deer repairs; having a real tree service trim off breaks and snags. With so much damage in our area, it’s taking weeks just to get an estimate. At least I don’t have to worry about the woodchuck. Yet. When she does emerge she’s going to be very hungry.